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WHAT 

IS THE MATTER 
WITHtheCHURCH? 


BY 

FREDERICK STANLEY ROOT 


THE 

Mbbey press 

PUBLISHERS 

114 

FIFTH AVENUE 

Condon NEW YORK Montreal 










Library of Congress 

Two Copies Received 

DEC 5 1900 

No $ 7 .:.?}.? ./..3L?r 

SECOND COPY 

Oeilvored to 

ORDER DIVISION 

DEC 22 1900 



Copyright, igoo, 
by 

THE 

Bbbe*> ipress 

in 

the 

United States 
and 

Great Britain 


V 


All Rights Reserved. 





FOREWORD. 


In his book on the “Intellectual Life,” Philip 
Gilbert Hamerton remarks: “I do not look upon 
an opponent as an enemy to be repelled, but as a 
torch-bearer to be welcomed for any light he may 
bring.” The chief desire of the author is that the 
many or the few who may turn these pages will 
accord to him a patient hearing in the Court of 
Reason, even though persuaded that some of the 
counts in his Indictment do not hold against the 
Modern Church. In this spirit only will the pro¬ 
found utterance of Gilbert Hamerton fulfil its 
mission in leading the mind to dispassionate com¬ 
parison of opposing views. Truth is not found 
in the shadow of crossing swords but in high- 
minded and calm debate between those who cher¬ 
ish with equal fervor the end sought, yet differ¬ 
ing as to methods for achieving that end. The 
author has but one purpose, which is to help all 
good men and true in a zealous and faithful 
effort to build the Church into the glorious like- 



Foreword. 


ness of her Founder. To all such he extends the 
greetings of fraternity. 

It is a courtesy herewith gratefully acknowl¬ 
edged that the author is permitted by the New 
York Evening Post, the Outlook, the Christian 
Register, of Boston, and the New York World, to 
republish, with some essential changes, the large 
amount of matter originally printed in the 
columns of these journals. Certain chapters in 
this volume appeared serially in the Evening 
Post. 


Frederick Stanley Root. 



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. 


Frederick Stanley Root was born in 1853 , in 
New Haven, Conn.; educated at a military 
school; graduated in Law at Yale, 18yd, and in 
Divinity at Yale, 1879. He was pastor of High 
Street Congregational Church, Auburn, Me., and 
afterwards pastor of Park Church, Hartford, 
Conn., a church memorable for the long and ex¬ 
alted service of Horace Bushnell in the pastor¬ 
ate. 

He is now General Secretary of the American 
Social Science Association and editor of “Social 
Science Journal.” Mr. Root also pursued special 
studies in sociology at Harvard. 

He has published (( Old School Days at Callen¬ 
der,” astory, and also several short stories; and has 
contributed on literary, sociological, and religious 
topics to the “Independent,” “Outlook,” “Con- 
gregationalist,” “Churchman,” “New York Tri¬ 
bune,” and is an occasional editorial writer for 
other New York journals. 

Present place of residence, New York City. 


v 





CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Wanted: A Society for the Decrease of the 

Ministry . n 

CHAPTER II 

The Capture of the Church by Commer¬ 
cialism . 23 

CHAPTER III. 

Some Practical Results of Commercialism, 31 

CHAPTER IV. 

Is the Church Losing Ground?. 40 

vii 






Contents. 


PAGE 

CHAPTER V. 

The Relation Which New Theology Sus¬ 
tains to Existing Church Conditions. 49 

CHAPTER VI. 

The Obtuseness of the Church to Changed 

Conditions . 58 

CHAPTER VII. 

The Responsibility of Divinity Schools for 

Existing Church Conditions. 68 

CHAPTER VIII. 

The Wage-Earner’s Opinion of Existing 

Church Conditions.. 77 

CHAPTER IX. 

Modern Church Life Developed by Mutual¬ 
ism, not Socialism. 86 

viii 







Contents. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER X. 

Light on the Horizon. 96 

CHAPTER XI. 

Some Characteristics of the New Move¬ 
ment in Theology. 106 

CHAPTER XII. 

Christianity in Its Relation to the Idle Rich 

and the Idle Poor. 118 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Practical Christianity. 134 

CHAPTER XIV. 

The Relation of Music to Worship. 154 

CHAPTER XV. 

A Symposium. 170 

IX 











WHAT IS THE MATTER 

WITH 

THE CHURCH? 


CHAPTER I. 

wanted: a society for the decrease of the 

MINISTRY. 

I wish to avow at the very outset of this chap¬ 
ter that my aim is to discourage young men from 
entering the Christian ministry at the present 
juncture of affairs in the Protestant body, except 
under conditions which will be specifically named. 
Of late there has been much discussion here and 
there relative to the increasing difficulty of plac¬ 
ing men trained to the gospel ministry, but in no 
case has it been the privilege of the writer to read 
a thoroughgoing, dispassionate, clear-headed sum¬ 
ming up of the causes which make the caption of 
U 



What is the Matte* with the Church^ 


this article a perfectly defensible thesis. The 
very constitution and temper of venerable semi¬ 
nary professors and supporters of societies for as¬ 
sisting young men into the ministry forbid that 
common-sense view of existing conditions in the 
church which, when fully realized, deter bright 
young men from the study of theology. The 
fact is, confirmed by abundant testimony and by 
the reluctant admissions of men who are inter¬ 
ested to maintain the contrary, there never was 
a time when a bright, clean, self-respecting, tal¬ 
ented, and absolutely fearless young man under¬ 
took a greater personal risk in committing him¬ 
self to the restless sea of ministerial supply and 
demand. It would require a book in place of a 
chapter to demonstrate this; but if ever a fact 
is more easily demonstrable the writer will hail 
it with acclamation! 

The initial note in the discussion of the problem 
is most significant. I refer to the all-pervasive 
restlessness and discontent, the ill-concealed dis¬ 
gust with present churchly conditions, the deep 
underlying anxiety for prospective bread and 
butter, the ominous foreboding for the future 
which one finds reflected in the private confi¬ 
dences of so many ministers now holding pastor¬ 
ates. A prominent officer of a missionary society 
\2 



Wanted: A Society. 


is reported to have said that in all his visitations 
among the clergy of a certain state, he had failed 
to discover a single incumbent who did not wish 
to make a change. I have in my possession a let¬ 
ter from a successful and honored pastor in New 
England, for fifteen years in one parish, but now 
desirous of change for weighty reasons, and who 
writes me: “It makes one sick of the whole 
business to see the scramble for place.” Not long 
ago an able and useful clergyman, whose ser¬ 
mons are in print in a notable publication, finding 
it desirable to resign his pastorate, deliberately 
turned his attention to the study of law rather 
than enter upon a fierce, degrading, heart-break¬ 
ing competition for another pulpit. And it was 
a shrewd observer in Boston, one who knows 
thoroughly the inside of the situation, who wrote 
recently to a ministerial friend, “Stick to your 
pulpit at any hazard! I never knew such awful 
times in the ministry as now.” “Stick at any 
hazard.” That is precisely what hundreds of 
clergymen are doing, able, upright men, and capa¬ 
ble of rendering admirable service, but over¬ 
worked or not happily married to their parishes. 
And they linger on because another field does not 
open, and because they fully realize that, once 
churchless, as the distinguished Dr. X. said to the 
\Z 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


writer, “it is almost impossible to secure another 
parish.” The very fact that such advice is given 
by one whose business it is to feel the pulse of the 
ministerial market, may well excite apprehension 
in clerical circles. And of such testimony the 
writer could furnish a dismal sufficiency. 

But what is the key to such a state of affairs 
in the Christian church? That many pastors are 
happily at work is not denied. Yet why are hun¬ 
dreds more in a state of mental unrest and 
anxiety? The answer goes straight to the heart 
of the problem. The key to the difficulty is 
found in the fact that there are too many min¬ 
isters—not for useful unsalaried work, but for 
available vacant churches. This is especially 
true of certain denominations. It is measurably 
true of all. If recollection does not play me 
false, Dr. Barrows some years ago conclusively 
showed in a remarkable paper that there are 
thousands of unnecessary clergymen and more 
thousands of unnecessary churches. The ranks 
are overcrowded, and will continue to be over¬ 
crowded as long as the present wretched system 
of ecclesiastical business management endures. 
A certain Congregational church in Connecticut, 
with by no means an inviting future, received not 
less than 250 applications, scattered all the way 
U 



Wanted: A Society, 


from Maine to California. And such ratio is 
more than a thrice-told tale. The guarded and 
reluctant admissions of religious weeklies rein¬ 
force this statement. For example, the Boston 
Congregationalist plainly declared that in cer¬ 
tain sections of the country the supply exceeds the 
demand, and quoted, disapprovingly to be sure, 
the remark of a home-mission secretary, that 
“our seminaries next autumn ought to refuse to 
take any new men.” The gravity of the situa¬ 
tion is quite apparent without further argument 
when the officer of a society which has hitherto 
clamored unceasingly for men low-salaried and 
hard-worked, calls a halt on the line of supply. 
And the result of overcrowding lowers manhood, 
cheapens the profession, shortens terms of pas¬ 
toral tenure, encourages fickleness on the part of 
the churches, and reduces to veriest commercial¬ 
ism the barterings between candidates and 
churches. Indeed, the commercial basis of 
modern church life is one of the most discourag¬ 
ing tendencies of our time. 

Now it will not do to urge the customary pleas 
in extenuation of such conditions. It is urged, 
for instance, that seminary students find little 
difficulty in obtaining places upon graduation. 
This we may accept as a fairly correct statement, 

15 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


and for the following reasons: As a rule such 
graduates are unmarried, and they can well afford 
to be content with a meagre salary for the sake 
of a position somewhere. Moreover, the craze 
for neophytes in the ministry is a marked feature 
of all denominational life. But with multiplying 
years value often diminishes. The real pinch of 
ministerial tenure comes with the first gray hairs, 
and not long ago a writer in a certain religious 
journal contended that the age of forty—a period 
when, according to Mr. Beecher, a man has fairly 
learned to employ skilfully the tools of his pro¬ 
fession—establishes the clerical dead-line. This 
may be a somewhat rash assertion, but if one 
will take the trouble to note the ages of men 
‘‘called’* to various churches, I venture to say there 
will be comparatively few beyond the age of 
fifty. Truly this may be the fault of the men 
themselves. They may have ceased to grow 
mentally, and are possibly indifferent to fresh 
methods of parish development. But we are fac¬ 
ing a condition, not a theory; and the condition 
is that the young fellow just out of the Divinity 
School, although placed at first, is extremely 
likely to remain unplaced in middle life, if for 
any reason he resigns one charge without an¬ 
other in prospect; and this with a grown-up 
\6 



Wanted: A Society* 

family dependent on his salary. The woods are 
full of the unemployed. A contributor to the 
Evangelist states the truth with chilling frank¬ 
ness when he says: “Congregations are unwill¬ 
ing to call a preacher who is up in years because 
they dislike to freeze him out in his old age and 
there is no other way of getting rid of him.” 
Therefore, the usual seminary plea that its 
students find a parish fails of pertinency when 
urged as an argument against the growing and 
widespread conviction that the ministry is over¬ 
crowded. Is it strange that the note of alarm is 
being raised in the midst of all the sentimental 
gush about the crying need of clergymen? 

But we are told again that the pressure is great¬ 
est in New England and New York, and that the 
unholy scramble is chiefly for the more desirable 
pulpits. This is partially true and partially false. 
There are relatively as many applicants for an 
obscure, poorly salaried parish as for a prominent 
field. Even if this were not so, the undue pres¬ 
sure in the quarters named establishes nothing 
favorable in regard to the general situation. If 
educational societies that make an easy way into 
the ministry have raised up hundreds of men 
who are determined to settle East or nowhere, 
so much the worse for a system that encourages 
S7 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


the cultivation of a spirit quite the reverse of the 
spirit inculcated in the Pauline maxim, that the 
good soldier of Christ “must endure hardness.” 
Moreover, who will vouch for a state in the 
Union where the hue and cry after vacant pulpits 
is not formidably resonant? Who will name a 
pastorless church, East or West, that is not be¬ 
sieged ? 

The seminary professor will probably contend 
that the Websterian doctrine of “room higher up” 
is applicable to the situation described. Then 
let him at once put into practice the suggestion 
of the Congregationalist, expressed in the fol¬ 
lowing editorial words: “One source of relief in 
this ministerial problem must come from greater 
discrimination on the part of the seminaries. 
The desire to have large classes sometimes leads 
to the admission of men who would better be 
doing something else than preparing for the 
Christian ministry. Our seminaries surely have 
their share of responsibility in helping to abate 
the distress now arising from an overcrowded min¬ 
istry.” Exactly so. If financial aid in the form 
of Educational Society gratuities must be given, 
let the recipients be picked men of exceptional 
calibre. Such a policy would depopulate the 
ranks of ministerial candidates with an execution 
*8 



Wanted: A Society* 


little sort of frightful. And let also the semi¬ 
naries imitate Harvard Divinity School, which 
makes the cost of a theological education, in the 
matter of tuition, precisely the same as in the 
academical department. The whole seminary 
and Educational Society assumption that be¬ 
cause men are grievously needed in the ministry 
they must therefore be encouraged by gratuities 
is absurdly wide of the mark in the light of pres¬ 
ent facts. 

In theory, the ministry is a fair and inviting 
field to able and consecrated young men. That 
theory, under such conditions as are easily con¬ 
ceived and with a sufficient number of brainy and 
devoted recruits to fill the gaps made by death 
and debility, is wholly tenable. Under existing 
conditions the experience of hundreds who set sail 
upon the ocean of ministerial opportunity, only 
to return to port in middle life sadly battered 
and torn, repels the assumption. The remorse¬ 
less competition for places; the wire-pulling and 
pipe-laying merely to get a hearing in a vacant 
pulpit; the chance of being set aside in the full 
vigor of maturity; the alarming growth of short¬ 
term pastorates; the fact that men of decided 
ability sometimes wait four years for employ¬ 
ment ; the reluctant conviction that influence and 
\9 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


a “pull” will do for a man in the ministry pre¬ 
cisely what such factors will accomplish in poli¬ 
tics—all these considerations are powerful make¬ 
weights in turning the attention of high-minded 
young men to other pursuits. Is it any wonder 
that out of a class of 275 at Yale—the educa¬ 
tional stronghold of New England Congrega¬ 
tionalism—only five study theology? The bane¬ 
ful conditions which underlie much of our 
modern church life already begin to tell as deter¬ 
rent forces, and the “Society for the Decrease of 
the Ministry” in the next few years will have its 
work promoted and encouraged by an increasing 
dearth of theological students. The chief con¬ 
cern of the writer is to exhibit unflinchingly the 
actual status of the clergy, the unhappy position 
in which so many worthy ministers find them¬ 
selves for reasons just now urged. And the bur¬ 
den of any reply must logically involve a sweep¬ 
ing denial of the premises upon which these con¬ 
clusions are founded. The writer would be 
grateful indeed if a more optimistic view of the 
ministry could be vindicated. But something 
more than sentiment and religious tradition will 
be required to dispose of the cold and repellent 
facts already adduced. 

It may be said, as the final word from the 

20 



Wanted: A Society* 


writer’s point of view, that the young man now 
contemplating the ministry as his life-work 
ought, in justice to himself, to consider thor¬ 
oughly three questions: 

(1) Am I willing to face such momentous 
and disheartening possibilities for the sake of 
preaching the gospel just as long as God permits? 

(2) Is it right for me to marry and bring into 
the world a family when, according to the doc¬ 
trine of present ministerial chances, I may be 
stranded at fifty, with scarcely a hope of reen¬ 
trance upon my work ? 

(3) Am I ready to preach wherever a church 
is needed, for a time without pay or social privi¬ 
leges or advantages, in preference to accepting a 
call to some old hulk of an organization, politely 
named a Christian church, but which ought de¬ 
cently to die, having outlived its usefulness, and 
only endures because a few wealthy families pay 
the bills? 

The celibacy of the clergy, unless there be 
independent means of support, and the capacity 
to meet cheerfully great personal hardship, are 
two prime qualifications of mininsterial candida¬ 
ture in the present distressing state of the minis¬ 
terial market. When conditions improve—if 
they ever do—one may return to the traditional 
2\ 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


view of the clerical profession, and include mar¬ 
riage as a relation to be safely entered into with¬ 
out confronting a most appalling state of affairs 
when middle-life is spent! 


22 



The Church and Commercialism, 


CHAPTER II. 

THE CAPTURE OF THE CHURCH BY COMMER¬ 
CIALISM. 

In this chapter the writer proposes to establish 
the existence of conditions in the church of to¬ 
day whose ominous and menacing nature justi¬ 
fies the boldest utterance, conditions that still fur¬ 
ther emphasize the gist of his earlier thesis that 
men should be turned from the ministry rather 
than induced to enter it, unless, indeed, theologi¬ 
cal neophytes are imbued with the martyr-spirit 
that does not flinch under the startling inter¬ 
rogatory of the Rev. Dr. Watson—“Should Old 
Ministers be Shot?” And in this general survey 
one or more points must be broadly stated in 
general terms as basic material for what follows. 

On every lip to-day, where broad philosophi¬ 
cal interpretation of church life flashes intelligent 
message to the brain, there trembles the question, 
“What is the matter with the church?” It is 
not a new cry. Both Erasmus and Sir Thomas 
23 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


More in their time declared that “without a 
root and branch alteration of the forces and ten¬ 
dencies making from the heart of the church, 
catastrophe is not far off.” But that cry in the 
present is stupendously reenforced by such pre¬ 
dominance of the material over the spiritual in 
church relations as to warrant the assumption 
that the capture of the church by commercial¬ 
ism is now the supreme cause of its gasping, 
hand-to-mouth spiritual existence. And the im¬ 
pending “castastrophe” is not that of the wild 
torrent, sweeping all to sudden ruin, but rathe 1 * 
the action of a slow, malignant poison chilling 
the blood, while the bloom of apparent health 
yet lingers on the cheek of the victim. 

President Hadley, of Yale, once said in a 
Forum article: “It is easier to preach ideals 
than to look facts squarely in the face.” Even 
so. And the facts which result from this con¬ 
quest, as I shall explain in my next chapter, are 
so contrary to the primal instinct and purpose 
of the church of the living God as to weaken its 
power, cheapen its prerogative, jeopardize its in¬ 
fluence, and banish the spirit of Jesus from its 
councils. What sadder spectacle could be wit¬ 
nessed in the light of history? 

And, definitely, by commercialism is meant 

24 



The Church and Commercialism, 


this: It is the privilege of the church to rise above 
the prevailing note of its environment. This is 
the only sane condition of all progress. In the 
days of Luther that environment was one of ex¬ 
treme and far-reaching corruption. So testifies 
Sir Thomas More, a devout Catholic. But the 
church rose above it! In the Wesleyan period, 
the church struggled to breathe in an atmosphere 
of vast indifiference and sloth. But the church 
rose above it! To-day, the note of its environ¬ 
ment is a species of industrialism, which, as King 
Lear said of the boisterous night, “pities nei¬ 
ther wise men nor fools,” forcing the weakest to 
the wall, ringing the changes upon money as the 
“be-all and end-all” of existence, gauging human 
merit by its gold-winning capacity, precipitating 
into literature what the Saturday Review terms 
the “cash author,” painting for the vulgar rich 
man in daub and splash what he pays for by the 
yard. So this industrialism grinds under the 
“iron heel of necessity,” to quote Ricardo, the 
fairest and sweetest flowers of ethereal life and 
hope. Does the church rise above such environ¬ 
ment ? 

In some instances we must answer yes; in the 
main current of its endeavors, no. With the 
great majority of churches, at least of Protestant 
25 





What is the Matter with the Church? 


faith, the financial question is ever uppermost. 
And if the chief end of man is to “glorify God,” 
as the old catechism hath it, the chief end of 
thousands of churches is to meet a culpable ex¬ 
travagance in expenditure, so as to turn the year 
with a three-thousand-dollar “crack quartet” 
paid to date, even though the heavenly record- 
book of sinners saved writes not a soul to the 
credit account. And if one notes carefully the 
methods of churches, especially those of the fash¬ 
ionable type, one must quickly discern that the 
plate-glass-show-window-brown-stone-front as¬ 
pect of things is always foremost. This necessi¬ 
tates also what is popularly known as a “hustler” 
in the pulpit, if the vulgarism may be pardoned, 
in order that high-priced pews may be filled to 
meet the bills. According to the Rev. Dr. 
Faunce, who ought to know, modern church¬ 
goers “admire the hustler more than the 
Prophet,” and the “rub-a-dub-dub” style of pul¬ 
pit oratory, to borrow a phrase from Webster, 
that “smites the sins of the Egyptians four thou¬ 
sand years ago, or the immoralities of Paris four 
thousand miles away,” is vastly more palatable 
than fearless exposure of the worldliness of the 
sleek and sleepy hearer in the pew. 

Felix Adler said recently, “Our whole society 

26 



The Church and Commercialism. 


is infiltrated with the money-getting idea.” The 
church is capable of soaring above this incubus. 
Does it ? How can it when pastor and committee 
are too often involved in the “vicious circle” of 
ideas relative to the maintenance of a position in 
the competitive church race, where lavish and un¬ 
wise expenditure perpetuates debt, and debt locks 
fast the immortal truths of the spiritual life in the 
iron jaws of a commercial church necessity? 
Why again? Because commercialism, utterly 
destitute of spiritual conceptions, and, in its 
place, rightfully obedient to a natural law of pro¬ 
cedure, as certainly as the procession of the plan¬ 
ets, usurps the sphere which should be devoted to 
Christly ideals, and controls the measures and 
methods of the church by a foreign and alien law 
wholly opposed to the teaching of its Head. Pre¬ 
cisely how this law works will be seen later. 
Sufficient now to establish the thesis, referring 
proofs to the orderly sequence of these chapters. 

Now it will not answer to affirm that the church 
of the present is doing much for humanity in the 
aggregate. That the sum of her activities is a 
potent factor in the world’s progress is conceded. 
But it is not alone a question of how much — it 
is a question of how much commensurate with 
her vast wealth, her vast constituency, her vast 
27 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


tradition, and the’ vast body of the Christian 
consciousness of the centuries. An equally as¬ 
tonishing fund of resources in business, thor¬ 
oughly utilized, could make every wilderness to 
blossom as the rose, enlarge every fortune to ten¬ 
fold dimensions, and lift every industrial enter¬ 
prise to heights of colossal amplitude. A giant, 
because of his strength, might do many deeds of 
helpfulness to the weak; but if a giant exerted 
only a tithe of his potential strength because he 
chose to pamper and overfeed his body, his altru¬ 
ism would be only a small draft on the bank of 
his resources! Why, then, does the church, with 
comparative feebleness of effort, distribute her 
historic beneficence in rills when her power 
should be raised to the exhaustless energy of an 
ocean tide? 

To-day opportunity stands at the door of the 
church like a courier ready to be off on heavenly 
mission. To-day the world is waiting as never 
before, with almost panting expectancy, the un¬ 
folding of that consummate flower and fruit of 
all civilization that endures, the pure religion of 
Jesus whose vine was planted in the fertile fields 
of Palestine in the long ago. To-day, as never 
before, man is studied both in his individuality 
and in his relations, and not merely as a unit or 
28 



The Church and Commercialism, 


pivot in some dry-as-dust economic scheme. To¬ 
day, the conception of fraternity—which, as 
Frederick Maurice said, cannot exist “without the 
conception of a common Father”—is growing 
stronger outside the church, and barely holding 
its own within the church. Why does the church 
so feebly responds to voices calling her importu¬ 
nately to higher motive and more unselfish en¬ 
deavor? Is it because commercialism has made 
of her cohorts a species of “bourgeoise aristoc¬ 
racy”? Is it because her vigor falters with the 
growth of her wealth, and the palsy of indiffer¬ 
ence seizes upon her vital forces through the 
chilling of her heart and life? 

These are questions that must be bravely met. 
Here and there a solitary pulpit flings back a 
courageous challenge to such dominant commer¬ 
cialism. But, as a rule, the traditional defender 
of the church as it is goes ofif on erratic tangent 
and pipes upon his wheezy reed the plaint of 
false doctrine as responsible for prevailing condi¬ 
tions, or sighs lugubriously through his instru¬ 
ment that “mere worldlings” in church member¬ 
ship, forsaking the prayer-meeting for the theatre, 
undermine the citadel of faith! Such pipings 
are but the wasted breath from feeble lungs. 
The causes of churchly decline are deeper, dead- 
29 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


her, darker. They inhere in the very bones of 
that dry-rot of arid commercialism which unless 
overcome writes “Ichabod” upon the walls of the 
church. 

Froude declared, “In my day the knotty prob¬ 
lems of theology are evaded.” Froude would 
not say this were he living now. He might say 
the problem of the comparative failure of the 
church to live up to the unequalled grandeur of 
her opportunity is met by dissertations on the 
errors of Unitarians, the necessity of pounds and 
shillings to keep the ark of Jehovah from toppling 
over, the need of emotional revivals, and the aw¬ 
ful contingency that must be faced if some “Boss” 
Platt of finance should take offence at pungent 
pleaching, and leave a ghastly, staring hole of 
deficit in the bottomless well of lavish churchly 
expenditure. And in saying this the reincar¬ 
nated Froude would wing his shaft in painful 
proximity to the bull’s-eye of the target! And 
keen observers of our time, unbiased enough to 
see things as they are, and not as they are popu¬ 
larly supposed to be, are not disinclined to this 
opinion. In future chapters some apparently un¬ 
related facts may be charged home to this source. 


30 



Results of Commercialism* 


CHAPTER III. 

SOME PRACTICAL RESULTS OF COMMERCIALISM. 

In a previous chapter the writer sought to estab¬ 
lish the fact of commercialism as a persistently 
dominating influence in the church life of to-day. 
This commercialism was described as “bar sinis¬ 
ter” to all the high and holy ends the church is 
capable of achieving. It now remains to point 
out in this and succeeding essays some specific 
consequences flowing from such absorption. 
A_nd the first inevitable result is to perpetuate 
church organizations which should have died 
long ago, although it must be admitted that the 
interment would be difficult, since nature provides 
for the burial of everything under heaven but a 
dead church! 

A distinguished and courageous orthodox 
minister caustically observed a few years since, 
“We all know personally many churches that are 
social, financial, and religious impertinences.” 
Riotous indulgence in the forlorn mazes of statis- 
3 \ 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


tics brings excusable shuddering to the average 
reader; but a single fact may be urged as signifi¬ 
cant. In the one hundred thousand churches of 
five denominations, according to this authority, 
twenty-five thousand are wholly unnecessary. 
Therefore they may truly be termed “imperti¬ 
nences.” Why, then, are they kept alive ? Sim¬ 
ply because the principle of combination , now the 
advancing note of the business world, is entirely 
subordinate to the principle of competition in the 
religious field. And the strange feature is, that 
business men who readily combine to avoid loss 
in commercial relations, insist on the competitive 
principle applied to church relations. And the 
reason is that pride of appearances, honeycombing 
society with reckless expenditure, whose end is 
bankruptcy, carried over into the church, prefers 
an empty hulk concealing a handful of worship¬ 
pers, selected, to a people’s church, gregarious 
and democratic, where enthusiasm burns and the 
manifold godly labors abound. And this because 
a stronger Jew or Gentile congregation will oc¬ 
cupy that particular corner if the empty hulk 
“gives up the ghost,” and one star additional, 
albeit a waning star, is forced from the diadem of 
denominational pride! In other words, the dis¬ 
tinct commercial principle, “what your rival wants 
32 



Results of Commercialism, 


he must not have,” holds a congregation of fos¬ 
silized money-bags to the hulk lest some other 
body, numerically more affluent, do where this 
particular assemblage dies! This may be Chris¬ 
tianity, but to the unprejudiced mind it looks sus¬ 
piciously like senile church dementia. And the 
“hulk church”—whose name is legion—is one of 
the most depressing signs of the survival of the 
ecclesiastically unfit. 

Now from this corollary proceeds another re¬ 
sult which may be called deputized salvation, ac¬ 
complished by means of the branch store church, 
since we are mixing commercialism and religion. 
If the empty shell of a once prosperous church is 
left high and dry in the unfashionable down-town 
quarter, what means are taken to revivify its spent 
forces ? Will the methods of work and organiza¬ 
tion be altered to meet new conditions, as in St. 
George’s under Dr. Rainsford’s democratic and 
skilful leadership? Rarely. The church of this 
type changes its spots as sparingly as the leopard. 
It votes to move up town, flings out the bait of 
a costly structure placarded “debt,” and possibly 
close by some other marble structure on the down 
grade, bids for a famous pulpit “hummer,” as a 
trustee once phrased it, and throws a sop to con¬ 
science by raising the homely walls of a mission 
33 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


chapel! People have not gone from those 
regions; they have come and are coming faster. 
And people in fustian jackets are as susceptible 
to heart-to-heart talks and pleading earnestness 
of genuine brotherhood of soul as when Jesus 
taught. But to avoid the upper millstone of 
browsing west side goats and the lower millstone 
of swarming tenements, that church plumps itself 
where shekels are most likely to flow into its 
coffers. And the chapel, the branch store of the 
main enterprise, is left to show that gospel by 
deputy is still conceded. 

When police stations are built they are located 
at strategic points. Even Tammany, vile, but 
rarely stupid, avoids congesting its station-house 
depots of supply for impecunious braves. It re¬ 
mains for churches in great cities to pursue a 
policy of congestion. Jesus said, “Go, go to 
highways and hedges, to fields white for harvest.” 
He did not say, “Keep out of the wet of adverse 
commercial conditions for large pew rentals by 
running up town for shelter!” The present drift 
of well-to-do church life adopts a commercial 
principle of personal ease and comfort. The 
divine law is one of concentration of effort by 
diffusion of opportunities. It has regard mainly 
for the spot where the light of the divine truth 
34 



Results of Commercialism. 


is most needed. The church of the first Chris¬ 
tian century, conducted on the plan of a vast 
amount of church life in large cities to-day, would 
have broken the heart of St. Paul, stirred the rage 
of impetuous St. Peter, and forced indignant pro¬ 
test even from the gentle lips of St. John. 

But this is not the worst of commercialism at 
the heart of the church. It also cheapens and de¬ 
moralizes the clergy. The writer holds in high 
regard his brother ministers. He appreciates 
their position, and is the recipient of their con¬ 
fidences, which often reveal a soul-bitterness little 
dreamed of by congregations. But it is as cer¬ 
tain as anything can be that the clergy must be¬ 
come a class of moral giants in order success¬ 
fully to cope with the ignominious and depressing 
commercial environment that slows and chills 
the once divinely rich, warm currents of churchly 
function. Upon every side the clergyman hears 
“policy and caution” emphasized as the conditions 
of his tenure. Is he told in the seminary to be as 
bold as Isaiah, as fearless as Jeremiah, as out¬ 
spoken as John the Baptist? The writer never 
heard these admonitions in a three years’ course. 
It is the same old story everywhere of the in¬ 
evitable deficit, the inevitable wealthy few who 
make it up, the inevitable need of not offending 
35 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


those who keep the ship afloat. Most men, even 
of superb integrity of purpose, must possess the 
iron strength of Savonarola to resist the pressure, 
and under the self-delusion of “policy and cau¬ 
tion” lips are locked on questions of social and 
industrial reform, where the gospel message is 
clear as crystal, because commercial and not 
spiritual values warp the church from the plain 
pathway of practical righteousness. This may 
be pessimistic; it may be disturbing; but, with 
exceptions which he notes, it is the average man’s 
summary of existing conditions. And if the 
utterance be treasonable, as most utterances are 
when opposed to tradition, such treason gains 
support from many a secular unbiased news¬ 
paper column, as witness these words from a re¬ 
cent issue of the Evening Post: “The churches 
have a terrible responsibility in this matter (that 
of recognizing or tolerating political corruption¬ 
ists). Who does not remember Presbyterians co¬ 
quetting with Jay Gould? What Protestant 
church in this city would refuse a present of 
$50,000 from Platt? What Catholic church 
would turn on Croker?” And, it may be added, 
how many clergymen would dare insist that any 
political corruptionist should be expelled from 
membership, or that no seminaries of which they 
36 



Results of Commercialism, 

are trustees should receive a dollar won by bribes 
and railway wrecking, or that no church which 
they serve as pastor should receive at communion a 
worshipper known to have built his fortune on 
the blood and bones of men he has ruined, with¬ 
out a restoration fourfold as a proof of penitence ? 
Verily, if a certain type of a dominant commer¬ 
cialism is permitted to draw the water of life 
through the foul and encrusted tubes of its own 
profligacy, what of the future of the church of 
God? 

Say what we will, a flexible morality, predi¬ 
cated of the church, is worse than the “scarlet 
woman” at her heels. To grant that she may 
tolerate for one instant a double standard is to 
sign the death-warrant of her usefulness. And 
the whole disastrous efifect of making her line 
of conduct and method commercial in place of 
spiritual may be summed up in a sentence: The 
heritage of her immutable glory and surpassing 
truth is frayed out into the thin air of expediency 
to gain a temporary end. 

Expediency is the rock on which too often the 
conscience of the church has been wrecked. It 
is the duty of the church to answer the question 
what is ethical and true and just in the light of 


37 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


the teaching of its Founder; it has no more right 
to inquire what is expedient when moral problems 
press for solution than it has to post a ribbon of 
stock quotations at the portals of the sanctuary. 
And if the ethics of the New Testament, in the 
germ, are not broad enough to cover every phase 
of human effort, from that included in the maxim 
ot Louis Blanc, “Every morally legitimate busi¬ 
ness is tested in proportion as it performs a social 
service,” to the development of what George 
Saintsbury calls “erotimania” in literature, then 
the ethical teaching of Jesus fails of that com¬ 
pleteness inseparable from the world-conception 
of His divine authority. Orthodox defence and 
heterdox tinkering are but incidents in the sweep 
of truth. Theology conforms to no organic law 
of survival. But ethics, spiritualized by Christly 
inspiration, constitute the one unvarying stream 
of tendency on which men must launch the bark 
of self-hood. 

Now, commercialism at the heart of the church 
renders the method of the organization distinctly 
unethical. This, in turn, elevates the doctrine 
of expediency to a “bad eminence. ,, And the 
result is that Churchianity—not Christianity—is 
again on trial, and at a period when the church 


38 


i 



Results of Commercialism. 


should have vindicated triumphantly and over¬ 
whelmingly its holy and benign mission. 
Whether the church is actually declining must be 
left for further consideration. 


3 ? 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


CHAPTER IV. 

IS THE CHURCH LOSING GROUND? 

In two preceding chapters of this series the 
writer endeavored to show, first, that the church, 
broadly speaking, has been captured by com¬ 
mercialism ; and, second, that the results of such 
conquest are most disastrous to pulpit and pew. 
A natural inference from the foregoing would be 
that the church is losing ground in the commu¬ 
nity. That inference he accepts without hesitation 
as well founded. But at the very beginning of 
the discussion let us dismiss the merely statistical 
aspect of the case as of slight importance. The 
easiest of all argumentative prey is the man who 
opens his debate by exclaiming with a flourish, 
“Statistics show!” Show what? Generally 
what the disputant has pre-determined in his own 
mind as the truth of the matter. Montaigne said 
of words, “Words are vascular; cut them and 
they will bleed.” Statistics never bleed! They 
dry up and wither under the blows of the battle- 
40 



The Church Losing Ground 


door and shuttlecock game which contestants 
play with their significance. 

From the present point of view it is not in 
the least pertinent to inquire whether Dr. Carroll, 
or Dr. Dorchester, or any other able churchly 
statistician has made out a triumphant case of 
religious progress by the simple process of prov¬ 
ing the increase of membership rolls. Nor is the 
writer much impressed by Dr. Carson’s dismal 
figures informing us that in the “City of 
Churches” 600,000 are non-attendants, while out 
of 80,000 “new Brooklynites” added to the popu¬ 
lation in a year only 5,000 became church mem¬ 
bers. He rejects the assumption, based on these 
figures, that prevailing conditions are “absolutely 
appalling.” The kingdom of God is larger, 
grander, nobler than the church, whose only 
creed should be friendship with God, with all 
its implications. If the kingdom grows the 
church will round to its task as the complement 
of the kingdom in good time. And the very con¬ 
ditions described as “appalling” have an optimis¬ 
tic edge contributing to this very result, as will 
be seen later on. 

Both Dr. Carroll and Dr. Carson, as statis¬ 
ticians, touch only the outer rim of the question 
of churchly growth or decline. The real status of 

41 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


a religious body, comprising few or many, is de¬ 
termined by the quality of the work done, the 
consecration and devotion of its membership, the 
purpose of the organization as demonstrated by 
fruitage, and by the trend of the inner spiritual 
life as gauged by a certain adaptability in meet¬ 
ing the spiritual needs of the age and hour. The 
counting of additional heads in church member¬ 
ship—say a million more in a decade—proves 
nothing of value unless such accretion means 
commensurate development of power, energy, 
vitality, usefulness, and high regard in the com¬ 
munity. There has always been and always will 
be the true leaven of a Christly church within the 
hollow shell of a worldly church. And the 
measure of the leaven is the measure of the con¬ 
dition of the church. It is quite conceiveable that 
the church may be bigger numerically by far than 
fifty years ago, and still it may be steadily los¬ 
ing ground as the representative of Jesus Christ 
on the earth. And that is precisely what the 
writer means by the initial question of this paper. 

Now it is a singular fact that with all this sta¬ 
tistical flourish of trumpets the volume of com¬ 
plaints concerning the condition of the church 
spiritually was never more strenuous than to-day. 
IWe put aside the average wage-earner's estimate 
42 



The Church Losing Ground. 

of the organization, although keen students of 
social problems are not surprised that he should 
cheer the name of Jesus and hiss at the mention 
of the church. That organization means to him 
in its totality simply ecclesiasticism in purple and 
fine robes. But putting this aside, what says her 
own ministry? One might fill columns with 
testimony. The Methodist clergymen of New 
York, apropos of a report by Miss Helen F. 
Clark on the spiritual condition of the city, 
affirm: “Your committee is at a loss to know 
what to recommend for the relief of such fright¬ 
ful ignorance and depravity in the heart of our 
boasted Christian civilization—something more 
ought to be done to lift this awful pall that hangs 
over us.” (Is New York worse than Chicago, 
London, and other great cities where the church 
possesses almost fabulous wealth?) Dr. Rains- 
ford writes: “The church is not fitting herself 
to new conditions. The people don’t want her 
because down in her heart she don’t want them.” 
(Does the census roll of increased membership 
meet such indictment?) Dr. Hillis declares: “I 
know many men who never attend church and 
who are the best men in their communities.” 
(Shall we say such men would go if the church 
met the demands of all honest ethical inquiry 
43 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


fearlessly and ably?) The late Dr. McGlynn, 
true priest of God, solemnly averred, “Religion 
is losing its hold upon men.” (If the church 
were religious to the core and taught Christ's 
Christianity in its glorious completeness, could 
such loss be minimized?) Dr. Rylance refers to 
“ecclesiastical decadence.” (By such decadence 
does he really mean the growth of frills and 
forms for the purpose of concealing a spiritual 
void, or does he mean what the Saturday Review 
terms “religious decomposition” within the ven¬ 
erable walls of an outwardly imposing structure ? 

Are we to say, then, that such utterances and 
many of a similar tenor are symptomatic? And 
symptomatic of what? Of the general and un¬ 
easy consciousness in the minds of multitudes 
that the church is losing her grip? Do the facts 
warrant the apprehension? If the church had 
kept her grip in great cities—as by the law of her 
divine constitution she was bound to do—would 
the deliverance of the Methodist ministers be 
possible? Would the church of the first Chris¬ 
tian century, puny, weak, faltering, by numerical 
and wealth comparison, be liable to just indict¬ 
ment on this account, given the same conditions 
to overcome? With the enrichment of her mem¬ 
bers, the elevation of her place in the social 
44 



The Church Losing Ground, 


scale, the enlargement of her fashionable clien¬ 
tele, there has come a corresponding diminu¬ 
tion of her zeal and capacity for sacrifice. And 
the rising numerical inflection only adds to the 
burden of just condemnation. And if numbers 
be accepted as the test of spiritual prosperity it 
would follow that when the Church of Rome was 
all-dominant and all-compelling at the time of 
the Protestant Reformation she would be at the 
very acme of her spiritual strength and purity. 
Exactly the reverse of this proposition is true! 

It would be rank folly to estimate the capacity 
and fitness of an army by “paper tests” of 
strength. What concerns the general in com¬ 
mand is to know how many are “present for 
duty.” It signifies very little that in a popula- * 
tion of 62,000,000 in 1890, 23,000,000 in round 
numbers are communicants. What proportion 
can be relied on to report “present for duty” at 
any cost of personal ease and luxury? It is 
within the truth to say that legions of church 
members rarely or never go; many who attend 
evince small interest in the services. A dis¬ 
tinguished jurist, the pillar of an orthodox con¬ 
gregation, said to the writer: “I suppose in the 
course of my life I have heard thousands of ser¬ 
mons, but most of them trickle in at one ear and 
45 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


out at the other/’ In sparsely settled communi¬ 
ties, where church-going is looked upon as a 
badge of social standing, many attend service be¬ 
cause they are expected to, but as contributors to 
religious vitality they are of no more use than the 
fifth wheel of a coach. And in large cities there 
is one universal complaint of falling off in church 
attendance. A former New York pastor of wide 
experience remarked: “I find a woeful lack of 
earnest Christianity. The class of indifferent- 
ists grows daily. Costly temples are not half 
filled.” Such is the almost universal impression. 
And when church life is reduced to the dimen¬ 
sions of a social function, a function that includes 
a pew as an ethical asset, just as an opera-box 
goes in under the head of recreation asset, one 
may reasonably inquire: “Is the church losing 
ground ?” 

One of the healthful signs of the period in 
the religious field is a growing disposition to seek 
honestly the causes for this decline. One puts 
the blame upon preachers; another upon ad¬ 
vanced thought in theology; a third upon com¬ 
mercialism in pews, as in anti-slavery days 
when “cotton in the pews” blinded the eyes of 
worshippers to the plight of the fugitive bond- 
man, fleeingbythe glowofthe blazing North Star 
46 



The Church Losing Ground. 


to some far-off Canaan of refuge. But it is the 
startling fact which most concerns us. And to 
the clear-eyed, unprejudiced observer, unable to 
submit meekly to statistical bluff, there arises 
against his will the overwhelming conviction that 
the church is declining in those elements of 
power that promote her spiritual well-being. 
And this impression could not be so widespread 
unless supported by tangible evidence. In the 
nature of the case, as already pointed out, such 
evidence is anything but statistical. Given these 
conditions, what follows? Worship reduced by 
many to a purely social function; vast increase 
of wealth by church members, resulting in pitiful 
relative increase of benevolent offerings ; loss of 
spiritual vitality, induced by pressure of material¬ 
istic ideas and motives; the average man's con¬ 
viction that the church is slighting her opportu¬ 
nity ; complete silence of prominent pulpits on the 
real bone-and-sinew ethical problems of our time; 
the suggestion of countless remedies from every 
quarter to cure the existing evil—what conclusion 
must be arrived at from such premises? There 
is but one, namely, that the church yields inch by 
inch to the tide. 

It is to'said, however, that this conclusion is 
not necessarily pessimistic. Shall we forget our 

47 



"What is the Matter with the Church? 


Speilhagen, “Through night to light ?” Shall 
we forget that the pendulum of all progress 
towards better things perpetually oscillates be¬ 
tween action and reaction, and that onward and 
backward movements surge and resurge upon the 
arena of the contending world forces? The 
church will one day live again in the splendor of a 
benign and lofty purpose, but it will be a church 
“redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled” from 
conditions which belong to a dominant commer¬ 
cialism, a commercialism giving way ultimately 
to more ethical environment. The church of the 
future must be evolved from the storm and stress 
of its present vicious entanglement with “beg¬ 
garly elements,” and then it will live, as Emerson 
writes, “for thoughts and ideas imperishable.” 

“The hour is coming when men's holy Church 
Shall melt away in ever-widening walls , 

And he for all mankind; and in its place 
A mightier Church shall come, whose covenant 
Shall he the deeds of love.” 

And this fond hope continually cheers the 
heart of every patient and troubled watcher upon 
the walls of Zion. 


48 



New Theology and the Church* 


CHAPTER V. 

THE RELATION WHICH NEW THEOLOGY SUSTAINS 
TO EXISTING CHURCH CONDITIONS. 

Three preliminary chapters in the series on the 
modern church have cleared the way for special 
mention of particular phases of life and doctrine 
relevant to existing conditions. And it is but 
natural to consider, first of all, the claim so often 
put forth that new theology is largely responsible 
for the “downward tendency” in the church of to¬ 
day. Dr. Carson, a Presbyterian, to whom refer¬ 
ence has been made, attributes the decline in 
church-going, in part at least, to the alleged pre¬ 
dominant factor of pulpit discussion of the higher 
criticism. And the New York Sun voices the 
opinions of multitudes of honest church-folk 
when it propounds the following conundrum: 
“With Presbyterian .theological seminaries deny¬ 
ing the infallibility of the Bible, and Congrega¬ 
tional ministers like Dr. Lyman Abbott preaching 
that biblical miracles are not believable because 
49 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


they conflict with natural laws, how can the faith 
of the churches be kept warm and vital?” Such 
affirmations must be reckoned with. As a rule, 
they are quite sincere and often disclose a real 
sadness of heart lest the utterance of a noted Uni¬ 
tarian divine should prove true—“when evolution 
comes in by the door Calvinism goes out by the 
window!” 

Now, to the mind of the writer the sooner Cal¬ 
vinism finds any agreeable mode of exit from the 
church, door, window, roof, or keyhole, the better 
for the organization. The hiatus between Cal¬ 
vinism and the teaching of Jesus is so wide that 
the longest suspension bridge of skilfully articu¬ 
lated theological constructiveness wholly fails to 
cover it. But this is neither here nor there. The 
question is, in what measure, if any, is the new 
theology (so called) responsible for the unhappy 
conditions of church life already pointed out? 
To what extent is the higher criticism, with its 
corrollaries and implications, chargeable with de¬ 
cline of religious zeal and paucity of religious 
endeavor? It would be altogether practicable, 
from the progressive theologian's point of view, 
to answer these questions by “carrying the war 
into Africa.” That is, by holding a dogmatic and 
unenlightened pulpit conservatism responsible for 
50 



New Theology and the Church, 

the drift away from the church. The New York 
Tribune recently hinted editorially that the non¬ 
recognition of liberalism as a tolerated school of 
thought in the church might lead to wholesale 
defection. What must be the effect upon the 
minds of rational thinkers when clergymen teach 
that any man who accepts the testimony of 
geology against the six days’ creation story in 
Genesis is an infidel ? Is it strange that a Chris¬ 
tian mother writes to a religious weekly plead¬ 
ing for an “expurgated edition” of the Bible when 
a conservative clergyman proclaims that the 
ancient Jews did right, because the inspired 
Scriptures commended the deed, in ruthlessly 
slaughtering helpless women and children? 

A thoughtful member of the Church of Rome 
lately expressed to the writer his disgust and 
apprehension in view of the action of Cardinal 
Vaughn against the eminent scientist, St. George 
Mivart, for daring to suggest that the Bible 
might not be impeccable in scientific content. 
Are there not many in the Church of Rome, both 
devout and intelligent, who must deplore the 
course of this prelate as calculated to diminish 
the regard in which the great historic church is 
held? Personally, the writer is of the opinion 
that if the argument were to proceed on these 
5f 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


lines a good case would lie in the Court of Rea¬ 
son against extreme conservative teaching in 
theology as the cause of the admitted alienation of 
masses of reading men and women from the 
church. But we are not to press an indictment 
just now; rather must we meet an indictment, 
as already stated. And it is met by denying ex¬ 
plicitly the allegation framed by Dr. Carson, 
et al. 

Let us see, for a moment, what the new 
\ theology—purely a term of convenience—really 
is. To begin with, it is not new. The germs 
of present-day liberal doctrine are interwoven 
with the warp and woof of all church history. 
They are as old and older than the time of 
Gregory of Nazianzen. True, these conceptions 
have been steadily defeated at notable church 
councils, but only by the summary process of 
“counting noses.” And shall we say that because 
majority votes have inclined in one direction for 
centuries, they will always incline that way? 
And, at the very least, these conceptions have 
done good service in clearing up obscurities. 
That well-known representative German theolo¬ 
gian, J. A. Dorner, admits that even Deism, “by 
clearing away dead matter, paved the way for re¬ 
construction of theology.” People debate higher 
52 



New Theology and the Church. 


criticism as if it were a modern innovation. But 
higher criticism goes back to the last century. 
Witness the work of Alexander Geddes, and 
forthwith Roman Catholics and Protestants 
opened their batteries upon him, long before 
Kuenen was heard of. 

To-day the sum and substance of New Theol¬ 
ogy is simply this: It is a scholarly and brave 
endeavor to gather up all that is ethically and 
spiritually sound in Scripture, and to separate it 
from the chaff of ecclesiastical accretion; it is a 
sublime effort to make secure the foundations of 
faith in God and man by insisting upon the self- ' 
revelation of the Divine immanence in every 
human soul; it is the sloughing off of the inci¬ 
dental and transitory phases of thought from the 
body of Christian theology, in order to unfold 
more clearly the matchless supremacy of Jesus; 
it means the final upbuilding of a larger element 
of rational Christian faith upon the ruins of 
divers petty theological schemes, whose genesis 
is scriptural only in the sense that an arbitrary 
collocation of isolated texts usurps the place of 
immutable truth. The liberal party in the church 
—even the most advanced wing—seeks to free 
the life of the soul by cutting away the impedi-* 
menta of theological abstractions, thus bringing 
53 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


the soul back to its first and noblest contempla¬ 
tion, the love of God in Jesus Christ. 

Now, on this view of the case, there is no 
logic or reason behind the plea that advancing 
religious thought works to the spiritual disad¬ 
vantage of the church. No great truth, dear to 
the heart of intelligent faith, and useful in pro¬ 
moting the flow of spiritual forces in religion, 
is jeopardized by the labors of a Wellhausen or 
a Briggs. To affirm the contrary is to deny, in 
effect, the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the 
Mount. The real infidelity of the period is fhat 
infidelity which binds the church to commercial¬ 
ism, saps her strength by inconsistency of life, 
elevates to a position of vital importance a mere 
doctrinal tenet, always in dispute. Infidelity is 
lack of fidelity to that measure of truth a 
man accepts. And the actual deterrent to church 
attendance—next to causes mentioned—is the 
cold and unpalatable fact that the church is in¬ 
different to the ethical conceptions on which her 
progress depends. The Rev. Graham Taylor, 
D.D., of Chicago Seminary, never uttered a more 
incisive word than this: “The conscience of 
Christendom will not much longer tolerate the 
profession of belief in Christian altruism as a 
rule of practice, while life itself is maintained by 
54 



New Theology and the Church. 

conformity to the diametrically opposite principle 
of every man for himself.” Here is the most 
potent initial cause of all the evils which now 
militate against the prosperity of the church. As 
broad-minded and glorious Phillips Brooks once 
declared: “It is not opportunity men want; it 
is fire” And fire—the heat of spiritual fervor— 
is no more certainly an orthodox than it is a 
heterodox possession. 

Let us bring the whole matter to a simple con¬ 
crete test. It is said in many ultra-conservative 
quarters that a New Theology, casting vigorous t 
doubts upon the doctrine of eternal retribution, 
diminishes church attendance and weakens per¬ 
sonal concern in religious affairs. Now what 
is the consensus of opinion to-day as to the value 
of emotional revivals of religion? Is it not that 
such revivals are mostly pernicious? But under 
such conditions only is the dogma of an endless 
hell bellowed forth with noisy insistence, and 
generally by men of the type of a Brooklyn evan¬ 
gelist, now mercifully taken from us, who so re¬ 
cently repelled all fair-minded people by his slan¬ 
derous eloquence. The crowds were drawn? 
Of course they were—out of pure curiosity. So 
crowds were drawn to see the bone of a mammoth 
on duty as the thigh-bone of St. Christopher. 
55 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


The most discreditable thing about an emotional 
revival is the crowded attendance in an age of de¬ 
velopment by Christian nurture. Numbers, then, 
cannot be predicated as proof of prosperity in Zion. 
A crowded auditorium may not be half so sig¬ 
nificant of growth in religion as a small, perhaps 
thinly attended church, working quietly, steadily, 
unobtrusively. We greatly doubt if concern for 
making the most of one’s self, spiritually, is 
nearly as pronounced where eternal retribution is 
vociferously preached as it is where the law of 
I the spirit life is unfolded step by step in all its 
gracious beauty. Men are thus made ashamed 
of spiritual poverty. The lack of personal con¬ 
cern in religion is quite as obvious among the 
stiffest Presbyterian churches in New York City 
as it is where liberal congregations assemble. If 
the crippling of the doctrine of eternal punish¬ 
ment is the cause of religious decline, it should 
follow that where the tenet is stoutly maintained, 
church life must throb at fullest tension. Such 
is not the fact, as may easily be proved from the 
lips of unwilling witnesses. 

We repeat, then, that New Theology as out¬ 
lined is not a hindrance, but a help, to the 
church; not a bar to the progress, but a gate- 
j way. But for the development of broader views 
56 



New Theology and the Church, 


in religion, alienation from church attendance 
would be still more marked. Liberalism will 
ultimately be recognized as a sheet-anchor hold¬ 
ing the church to her moorings in the minds of 
the thoughtful. The solution of the existing 
problems of practical church undertaking lies 
deeper than orthodoxy or heterodoxy. The 
remedy is not doctrinal; neither is it discovered 
in the appeal to history. That remedy is linked 
with social, industrial, economic, and psychologi¬ 
cal movements whose development under the law 
of the “pain of progress” acts and reacts immedi-, 
ately and powerfully upon the life of the church. 
Groping mortals are now permitted to behold 
only foregleams of light upon the horizon. 
What that light means as interpreted by the 
writer must be reserved for further statement. 


57 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


CHAPTER VI. 

THE OBTUSENESS OF THE CHURCH TO CHANGED 
CONDITIONS. 

In any discussion of the causes which con¬ 
tribute to the unsatisfactory state of affairs in the 
church of to-day, as protrayed in these essays, 
we must not overlook her own want of perspicac¬ 
ity in failing to interpret correctly “the signs of 
the times. ,, Her obtuseness in regard to the 
changed and changing circumstances of her en-* 
vironment reacts unfavorably upon the conditions 
which alone give impulse to every form of prog¬ 
ress. The indispensable requisite to onward 
movements of every description is adaptability. 
And by adaptability I mean the adjustment of the* 
life and purpose of an organization to the new 
conditions springing up in a new age. This may 
be affected without the slightest deflection from 
the essential integrity of the basic truth or princi¬ 
ple on which that organization is founded. But 
the application of that basic truth or principle 
58 



The Church and Changed Conditions* 


must conform to outward conditions inseparable 
from advancing civilization and ripening knowl¬ 
edge. 

Now the prime difficulty with the Modern 
Church is this: It too often fails of bold, de¬ 
cisive, undaunted, comprehensive, and enlight¬ 
ened leadership in matters where the church has 
divine authority to act. It refuses to accept the 
inevitable when that inevitable is simply the point 
of view forced upon human understanding by the 
stern law of progress obedient to law. And law, 
as Hooker said, “finds her seat in the bosom of 
God.” The church wastes time in debate and 
parley as to the course to be pursued when the 
only possible course is that which is made ap¬ 
parent by the logic of circumstances. The 
church, for example, has discussed in conference 
for twenty years, “How shall we reach the 
masses ?” But the masses are not reached by the 
organization as a whole, and never will be while 
that organization fails to order its forms of wor¬ 
ship and shape its methods of work so as to gain 
the sympathies and win the respect of wage- 
earners. And through the medium of three con¬ 
crete illustrations I will endeavor to show how 
this obtuseness militates against the genius of 
church extension. 


59 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


(i) The obtuseness of the church is obvious 
in the attitude maintained toward the liquor 
traffic. This is said with all due regard to ex¬ 
ceptions here and there noted, as voiced by the 
manly and sensible utterances of Bishop Potter, 
Dr. Rainsford, and others. From time im¬ 
memorial the average pulpit fulmination against 
the liquor-dealer has been violent in the extreme. 
I do not say the dispenser of creosote and ben¬ 
zine is generally a commendable personage. Un¬ 
doubtedly, he is not infrequently a “shady” mem¬ 
ber of society—however welcome to the councils 
of St. Tammany. And the corner saloon is ad¬ 
mittedly the pest of municipalities. But the 
error of the church lies in its stubborn unwilling¬ 
ness to see that the liquor-dealer is himself the 
product of conditions that make the traffic inevita¬ 
ble under our present industrial status. In other 
words, if drink is the cause of poverty, poverty, 
to a very great extent, is also the cause of drink. 
On this point there is a large and convincing array 
of evidence, as the writer proved in an article con¬ 
tributed not long ago to the New York Independ¬ 
ent, in which that evidence was summarized. 

What the church needs to understand is this: 
Her environment is less and less Arcadian and 
idyllic as the population of cities grows, and the 
60 



The Church and Changed Conditions 


fierceness of the competitive industrial system 
drives with more stinging lash. Behind the 
saloon is the fact that until something better takes 
the place of the saloon, ministering to the gre¬ 
garious and social instinct among the wage-earn¬ 
ing classes, and until civilization allows wage- 
earners greater breathing room, the drink habit 
will not materially diminish. The church will 
not adapt itself to the wage-earners' environment 
because it fails to adopt the maxim of putting one's 
self in the other man’s place. And whenever, in 
truth and conscience, the church has done this—as 
in some parts of London—we find the process of 
abusing the saloon-keeper gives way to the more 
sensible scheme of changing the environment ' 
which makes his occupation lucrative. The 
feverish tension of modern life so alters the as¬ 
pect of every problem of civilization and morals 
that such problems must now be studied in alto¬ 
gether new relations. The Gospel is not so much 
fulminating powder to blow up the saloon; it 
is rather a principle of life that comprehends in 
its sweep the mitigation of every condition of un¬ 
necessary hardship whose lowest panacea is the 
Nirvana of drink. One model tenement-house, 
built on the ruins of rookeries sometimes owned 
by church corporations, is more tangible evidence 
6t 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


of the “Gospel in action” than fifty lurid sermons 
against the “demon of drink.” 

(2) But the obtuseness of the church to 
changed conditions is also apparent in its most 
unfortunate attitude toward the Sunday news¬ 
paper. The writer holds no brief for the Sunday 
edition of a metropolitan daily. Upon the whole, 
it might be well if that edition had never arrived. 
It has vicious features in abundance—incredibly 
vicious in certain quarters, features that are thor¬ 
oughly reprehensible. But we must ever reckon 
with that keen instinct of the American mind that 
is never satisfied until the latest event of world¬ 
wide importance in politics, history, literature, 
and science is known at the earliest possible mo¬ 
ment. That instinct is well illustrated by the re¬ 
mark attributed to Arnold of Rugby. Some one 
asked him why he read a Sunday paper. “Be¬ 
cause,” replied the great Englishman, “I wish to 
see how the Lord has governed the world since 
Saturday night!” I am stating the fact without* 
seeking its justification. The great mass of 
people desire the Sunday issue, and will certainly 
have it. Of good or evil import, or indifferent 
in moral effect, it has come to stay. We hold, 
then, that for church associations and for individ¬ 
ual clergymen to thunder ceaselessly against such 
62 



The Church and Changed Conditions* 


publication is a stupid waste of effort in seeking 
to overcome an accomplished fact. 

Next to the attempt of a Sabbath association to 
legislate against bicycle riding on the first day 
of the week, nothing could more plainly disclose 
obtuseness to fixed conditions. Clearly, the influ¬ 
ence of the church should not seek repression; 
rather should it seek to encourage those journals 
which put forth a clean, able, intelligent sheet 
on the Lord’s day, and thus rebuke the muck and 
mire paraded in certain other sheets. In all 
other respects, if we do not exactly like a thing 
firmly imbedded in usage, instead of conspiring 
to uproot the usage, we should endeavor to im¬ 
prove the quality of the product. And this evo¬ 
lutionary process, where participated in by 
church people generally, may ultimately give us 
editions of metropolitan journals on Sunday every 
whit defensible. As it is there are Sunday papers 
containing admirable tables of contents, poems, 
critiques, reviews, religious summaries, and ex¬ 
cellent stories—contents that in no wise dimin¬ 
ish worshipful feeling, while positively quicken-' 
ing intellectually. And on the lowest view of the 
case one may venture to say that many in the 
church talk business, gossip at the Sunday dinner, 
and otherwise bear a light and trivial part who 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


would not admit even this edition to their homes. 
'All religious observance is marred by painful, 
and, it may be added, by generally unconscious 
inconsistency. If the church will accept the fact 
of the Sunday newspaper as inevitable, and en¬ 
courage the self-respecting editor, whose aim is 
to publish helpful and stimulating matter, free 
from social cesspool scum, her attitude will be 
consistent, dignified, and wise. The plan of in¬ 
discriminate denunciation only serves to show 
that she has lost the power of acute reasoning 
from indefeasible premises. 

(3) Once more, the obtuseness of the church 
to changed conditions is apparent in her attitude 
respecting Sabbath observance. In the effort to 
restore the Puritan conscience—an absolutely 
hopeless undertaking, even if desirable—three 
dominant factors in present American life are 
ignored. First, the vast complexity and unremit¬ 
ting pressure of our economic and industrial 
status forever dissolves the New England village 
conception of the Sabbath. By this is meant that 
brain and brawn, when forced to the danger- 
point of exhaustion which now obtains in every 
realm of bread-winning toil, cannot be expected, 
to keep Sunday as did our forbears under radi¬ 
cally different economic conditions. The place of 
64 



The Church and Changed Conditions* 

worship is not diminished, but the need of whole¬ 
some recreation enlarges tenfold. 

Second, the old distinction between sacred and 
secular, in the light of a broader conception, based 
on the philosophical truth of the immanence of 
the Deity in all that is, is gradually breaking 
down by virtue of its inherent unethical content. 
Since all days are equally sacred to the uplifting 
of humanity to higher planes of thought and pur¬ 
pose, no one day is to be dedicated to formal re¬ 
ligious observance, except in so far as that day, 
by association, tradition, and custom, affords 
unique opportunity. 

Third, the stress of this entire Sunday ques¬ 
tion, applying principally to large cities, forbids 
attempts to formulate rules, maxims, theories in 
legislation affecting social habits, without first 
taking into account the honest convictions of im¬ 
mense numbers of people belonging to nation¬ 
alities other than our own. In other words, the 
church has no right to insist on the traditional 
New England interpretation of the fourth com¬ 
mandment, when large masses of our fellow- 
creatures, law-abiding and religious, according to 
their light, hold a different opinion of the force 
and scope of that commandment. 

JIow, the writer maintains that the majority of 

65 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


movements in the church contemplating stricter 
Sabbath observance ignore these fundamental 
considerations, and are consequently abortive be¬ 
cause inimical to common sense. Yes, and he is 
audacious enough to affirm inimical also to the 
spirit of Christ’s teaching. The question of Sab¬ 
bath observance depends entirely upon the point 
of view. There is no arbitrary enactment in 
Scripture which ties the church down to hard and 
fast conditions. Frederick W. Robertson, in his 
famous sermon on the opening of Sydenham 
Palace on Sunday, if I mistake not, cuts the 
ground completely from under the feet of the 
traditional church view, unhappily revived in the 
formation of certain Sabbath alliances. There is 
hardly an act which any given person may per¬ 
form that is not likely to give offence to equally 
sincere and well-meaning other persons. What 
the church should seek is comprehensiveness of 
survey when it undertakes to rescue Sunday from 
what it deems spoliation of worship—a purpose 
most admirable in itself considered. But in do¬ 
ing this the church must not impinge upon an¬ 
other’s right to mingle the elements of worship 
and recreation in such forms and proportions as 
may appeal to his own conscience, without inter¬ 
fering with the worshipful rights of others who 
66 



The Church and Changed Conditions# 


accentuate these elements differently. The 
preachers who are to fill our pulpits must be 
trained in larger methods of religious interpreta¬ 
tion, both practical and spiritual, if the Sabbath 
question, and all other ethical problems, are to 
receive an interpretation in consonance with the 
plain facts of everyday life. 


67 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


CHAPTER VII. 

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF DIVINITY SCHOOLS FOR 
EXISTING CHURCH CONDITIONS. 

At the recent International Council of Congre¬ 
gational churches held in Boston, President Hyde 
of Bowdoin threw a lyddite shell into the con¬ 
servative camp by his bold strictures upon pre¬ 
vailing methods of clerical education. His con¬ 
tention, in a word, is this: There must be a radi¬ 
cal and costly reform in methods of seminary 
education. The training must be more exacting 
and up-to-date, for unless a man is kept alive on 
the living issues of the present, he will be unable 
to catch the living spirit from the writings of the 
Bible. There must also be first-hand secular 
knowledge, for it is useless to preach to a world 
whose ways of thinking one does not understand. 
Men must not be put back into the kindergarten 
or nursery by relying on dictated lectures at the 
expense of original personal investigation, and 
superfluous eleemosynary aid must cease. 

68 



Responsibility of Divinity Schools. 


Now, it is not in the least surprising that tradi¬ 
tionalists in attendance blew out flames of 
mediaeval wrath from indignant lips upon such 
opinions. What would become of scores of pious 
young men, nurtured on the family expectation of 
pulpit fame, if such audacious demands were al¬ 
lowed to go unrebuked? Must hermeneutics, 
apologetics, sacred rhetoric, Assyriology, biblical 
theology, and other “ologies” of ancient flavor 
give place to an endowed chair, whose incumbent 
should teach the art of getting the popular ear 
through knowledge of man’s present needs? 
Must the weather-beaten signboard inscribed 
"Candidates for the Ministry Wanted” be re¬ 
moved from its niche over the seminary portal? 
And so the battle was immediately on, and godly 
warfare, the chief delight of the theologians, was 
precipitated. But if Dr. Hyde did not hit the nail 
squarely on the head, the writer will cheerfully 
march to the cannon’s mouth of self-inculpation 
and be shot into shreds as a penalty for libelous 
utterance. He will even go further than Dr. 
Hyde, and say that if the theological schools for a 
quarter of a century back had taught the great 
truths of Christ’s Christianity in their practical, 
everyday relation to the living problems of our 
time, many of the unhappy church conditions de- 
69 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


picted in these papers would have been overcome, 
certainly strenuously resisted. 

Some years ago the writer sat in the study of 
a preacher known on two continents for the 
breadth of his scholarship, the progressiveness of 
his theology, and the clearness of his vision on 
social problems. The conversation turned on the 
unethical aspect of modern civilization, and at the 
conclusion of the interview the preacher ex¬ 
claimed in tones of lingering sadness: “When 
shall we have social righteousness ?” I appeal/to 
the experience of all progressive thinkers in the 
ministry of to-day, of twenty-five years’ standing, 
when I inquire, how many class-room lectures • 
were heard on the gospel of social righteousness 
with all its tremendous implications ? And yet, if 
the Gospel of Jesus means anything it means this 
in paramount degree. The New Testament is 
not worth the paper on which it is printed if it 
does not contain the germ principles of a human 
society founded on equity and fraternity. But in 
the writer’s day a divinity-school professor would 
have been transfixed with astonishment if, dur¬ 
ing Greek recitation, a student had ventured to 
ask whether the case of Dives and Lazarus was 
not, after all, a picture of a rotten state of human 
society instead of a proof text in support of the 
, 70 



Responsibility of Divinity Schools* 


doctrine of eternal retribution. The traditional 
curriculum in most seminaries of that period in¬ 
volved a discussion of the Logos one day, a pull 
at Hebrew roots another day, a tilt with Anselmic 
theology the third day, a wrestle with the canon, 
to say nothing of canons, on the fourth day, and a 
wind-up with sacred rhetoric in the chapel on the 
fifth day, when the homiletical mill ground to 
powder the efforts of budding neophytes and cov¬ 
ered the remains with the fine dust of critical con¬ 
tumely! And on the sixth day the theologue 
rested from his labors—and went fishing. The 
whole scheme of seminary education then re¬ 
volved in the orbit of the traditional, and the best 
Grecian or Hebraist plucked the seminary laurels. 

Now it is far from the writer’s purpose to 
decry sound learning as the ally of pulpit effi¬ 
ciency. He simply affirms that the awful problems 
of human society, whose only resolvent is the 
gospel in action, were prodigiously slighted, and 
that a three months’ course of dictated lectures 
on the sinuosities of biblical theology might well 
have been surrendered to the study of man as he 
is in social relations. One such course of lectures 
as that given by the Rev. Charles W. Stubbs 
(now, I believe, Dean Stubbs) to his Liverpool 
people on “Christ and Economics”—a striking 
1\ 



What is the Matter with the Church ? 


hook—would have aroused an intensity of feeling 
and purpose utterly foreign to the divinity 
student of that day, fed on Gesenius and the dis¬ 
putes of the fathers. And the result was that the 
divinity schools turned out men by hundreds who 
discovered that their “systems” broke down com¬ 
pletely when confronted with the cold, hard facts 
of work-a-day existence. In this wonderful book 
on “Rome,” Zola, speaking by the mouth of the 
Abbe Froment, declares: “An economical ques¬ 
tion is invariably hidden beneath each religious 
evolution.” This is certainly the truth of history. 
But in the older days of seminary training reli¬ 
gious questions were treated as so many theologi¬ 
cal concepts, quite separate from the struggle 
for bread and butter. There was little or no 
reference to the religion of Jesus as the fulcrum 
on which turned every social movement from 
Chartist agitation to tenement-house improve¬ 
ment. And men went out to preach—what? 
The great truths that ring from bold lips to-day 
in pulpits filled with the spirit of the social ethics 
of Jesus? No! With exceptions they went out 
to preach theology of the conventional type. 
And this theology was as incapable of reaching 
the deep, yearning heart of humanity as the effort 
of a brilliant seminary scholar I knew, who, in 
72 



Responsibility of Divinity Schools* 


addressing a congregation in a mission chapel, 
discoursed eloquently of the “truths, laws, and 
ideals of reason”! 

Do we wonder, then, that existing church con¬ 
ditions have been perpetuated by zealous, earnest, 
but mistaken methods of the divinity schools? 
Do we wonder that the tremendous social unrest 
of our time has been so little understood in its 
religious bearings? Do we wonder that wage- 
earners and students of social problems generally 
have found the church so recreant in duty, so 
neglectful of opportunity? All honor to the 
clergy, not a few in the aggregate, who, in spite 
of the incubus of seminary training, have met 
these problems of social regeneration with a keen 
desire to know their solution, and when that solu¬ 
tion is found in the slightest particular, to press 
home the remedy at the sacrifice of ease, luxury, 
and the plaudits of their fellows. And it is but 
fair to say that many honored instructors of the 
older generation, cloistered like monks in their 
libraries, if brought into contact with the untold 
miseries of social unrighteousness in a practical 
way, would “move to amend” the seminary cur¬ 
riculum with almost breathless insistence, born 
of new and tremendous realization of the mean¬ 
ing of the Gospel. 


73 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


And here we come face to face with a sign of 
promise on the churchly horizon. While Dr. 
Hyde is essentially sound in his criticism and 
maintains a position for the most part impreg¬ 
nable, it is possible that he fails sufficiently to em¬ 
phasize the progress recently made in divinity- 
school methods. What the middle-aged clergy¬ 
man of the present might have welcomed with 
joy unspeakable in his years of preparation is now 
the privilege of students in certain institutions. 
The study of social science in its purely practical 
aspects grows steadily in favor as an important 
feature of seminary drill. The wise and honored 
leaders of a decade past, not infrequently under 
public suspicion and disfavor, established courses 
for the investigation of questions uppermost in 
our social economy. I can recall one noble pro¬ 
fessor, still comparatively young, whose attempts 
in this direction invited the criticism that he 
“ought not to stir up discontent among the 
masses.” Ah! who among the preachers “stand¬ 
ing in jeopardy every hour” because of his heart- 
conviction of the supineness of the church has not 
heard this pitiful and disconcerting accusation as 
the death-knell of his pulpit peace? And these 
pioneers of but a few years since literally “blazed 
out” a path through forests of seminary lumber 
74 



Responsibility of Divinity Schools. 


to this goal. Their work has been most useful 
in equipping some churches with men competent 
to apply the broad ethical teachings of Jesus to 
present industrial conditions. 

That the lot of such preachers in a fashionable 
church environment often leads straight to Geth- 
semane no one can doubt. That clerical dis¬ 
tress, resulting from overplus of preachers and 
other patent causes, is an exceeding bitter cry 
may be easily established. But, nevertheless, if 
men will crowd into divinity schools, men lacking 
every quality of leadership, the schools, at least, 
are beginning to grapple intelligently with the 
real problems of human existence and will edu¬ 
cate such material as they have far more sensibly 
than ever before. Moreover, it is refreshing to 
know that the baneful seminary rivalry for “big 
classes” is yielding to the common-sense demand 
that theological education shall be harder to get 
and harder to complete. The placard “Can¬ 
didates Wanted Here” has been shelved in several 
conspicuous instances. It ought to have been 
chopped into kindling-wood long ago. Now that 
Dr. Hyde has shown where the axe is, the sound 
of splitting seminary sign-boards should make a 
“joyful noise” in the land. The divinity-school 
prospectus is not so alluring as it was—thank 
75 




What is the Matter with the Church? 


heaven! “The old order changeth.” Harvard, 
Chicago, Yale, and other theological schools, in 
addition to slowing up the movements of the elee¬ 
mosynary pump, are beginning to realize that 
churches are not just begging for preachers. On 
the contrary, preachers are begging for churches. 
And the day is not far distant when seminary 
authorities will discourage young men from seek¬ 
ing the ministry, rightly inferring that the young 
fellow who is not discouraged by the most grue¬ 
some tale of pulpit plethora, and welcomes hard¬ 
ship with a sparkle in his eye, is likely to make a 
preacher worth hearing, even if he fills a chair of 
tent-making to support himself, like immortal 
Paul. 

So, then, while fixing responsibility upon divin¬ 
ity schools for indifference of churches to social 
problems, we also commend these schools for 
awakening, though tardily, from Rip Van Winkle 
theological slumber. 


76 



The Wage-Earner's Opinion. 


CHAPTER VIII. 

THE WAGE-EARNER'S OPINION OF EXISTING 
CHURCH CONDITIONS. 

In the conduct of these discussions on the 
“Modern Church/' brief passing reference has 
been made to the average man's opinion of that 
institution. It is now proposed to get at the very 
heart of the wage-earner’s objection to the 
church. I employ the phrase “wage-earner” 
merely as a generic term to cover the attitude of 
a class in the community, while freely conceding 
that dissidents from this point of view are to be 
found in the very class described. It may be 
safely affirmed that among working people there 
are two class estimates of the value of the church. 
One expresses bitter and violent hatred of the or¬ 
ganization. An artisan with his dinner-pail in 
hand, while passing a costly and hermetically 
sealed church edifice on a leading thoroughfare, 
was heard by an eminent New York clergyman to 
exclaim, “G—d d—n the church!” We are deal- 
77 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


ing with hard facts in these essays, and it is well 
to be explicit, particularly since the clergyman did 
not hesitate to repeat the phrase in his own pulpit. 

This objurgation represents the extreme artisan 
animosity toward the institution. However 
shocking the utterance, let us be just and say that 
the language is far from implying necessarily the 
hatred of the principles of Christianity which are 
often wholly divergent from the principles on 
which the church builds. Now the other class 
estimate of the church is altogether more moder¬ 
ate and worthy of consideration. This type of 
wage-earner sums up his objections in a manner 
by no means offensive, and in some cases a note of 
sadness breathes through the pipe of his com¬ 
plaint. From long association with working¬ 
men, both in early factory life and in the begin¬ 
ning of his ministry, the writer is certain that he 
understands the sentiments of this moderate type. 
And some years ago, in studying this question 
afresh from the pages of four bulky volumes of 
the Blair Report on the relations between labor 
and capital, he discovered exactly the reasons, 
from the lips of workingmen, why the church is 
neglected. And here is what they say in a few 
pertinent quotations out of many quotable pages. 

A very intelligent Cambridge printer testified: 

78 



The Wage-Earners Opinion* 


“Mechanics do not go to church because they 
find a substitute for the religious idea in turning 
their attention to the remedying of social evils, 
the uplifting of their own class and those beneath 
them, and the righting of the injustice sustained 
by working people. Mechanics discover many 
charitable, humane, merciful people in the 
churches, but they also discover that many church 
members take advantage of the peculiar organiza¬ 
tion to advance their own selfish interests. It is 
not the spirit of religion the workingman objects 
to—he rather strives for that—it is the eccle- 
siasticism and dogmatism of some church mem¬ 
bers and the hypocrisy of others.” 


A type-founder in the city of New York testi¬ 
fied: 

“Workingmen believe that more money is put 
into church edifices than is right, and they look 
with suspicion on the power of wealth in the man¬ 
agement of churches. They are not on the best of 
terms with the clergy, because they believe that 
clergymen, as a rule, are not free to express their 
honest convictions. Large numbers of opera¬ 
tives would gladly send their children to Sunday- 
school, but do not feel able to dress them in the 
fashion which seems to be required by well-to-do 
churches—a fashion equally imperative in keep¬ 
ing parents from the House of God. Then, too, 
79 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


there is desire for rest, which, coupled with large 
decay of belief in theological conceptions underly¬ 
ing religious organizations, diminishes church at¬ 
tendance of wage-earners. ,, 


Now, if these testimonies, which are truly 
representative, and shrewdly as well as tersely 
expressed, could be reduced to scientific social 
phraseology, they would appear in the nutshell 
statement of a very notable clergyman, who also 
gave evidence before the Blair committee. Like 
many devoted thinkers in progressive pulpits, this 
clergyman found himself in close agreement with 
workingmen’s view of the church, and he sums 
up the case for his clients by urging these 
theorems: “Money and social position dominate 
the church; the church becomes the upholder of 
civilization as it is; it has accepted the anti-Chris¬ 
tian dogmas of the older economists, and in doing 
so has really turned traitor to the ethics of 
Christ. Is it any wonder,” he adds, “that the 
workingmen is repelled from a church that has no 
better gospel than the laissez-faire; no better 
brotherhood than the selfish strife of competi¬ 
tion; no kingdom of God for human society on 
the earth, but only a kingdom in the skies ?” And 
the conditions herewith described by workingmen, 
80 



The Wage-Earners Opinion* 

set forth by clergymen in propositions looking 
toward social reform, virtually state the whole in¬ 
dictment of the wage-earner against the organiza¬ 
tion. This indictment is the case of extremists 
and moderates alike. It is voiced by the violent 
antagonism, which, as Joseph Cook once re¬ 
marked, “hates the very shadow of the church 
steeple on the village green,” speaking for the 
mill-operatives of New England: and it is also 
voiced in the calm and temperate deliverances of 
the intelligent artisans who testified before the 
Blair committee. What shall be said of the truth 
or falsity, the reason or unreason, of the chronic 
workingman’s complaint of the church? 

The writer has no disposition to enter into the 
merits of the question in extenso. His own opin¬ 
ion of the status quo of modern church life, in 
the large survey, has been made sufficiently clear 
already. The straw will not be threshed over 
again. The complaint brought against the 
church by the workingman may be as groundless 
as the charges hurled at the early Christians by 
their foes. Their accusations may not ring true 
in the judgment of conscientious defenders of the 
church. We do not at present hold a brief for 
plaintiff or defendant; but this is the point to be 
insisted on, and it is vital: There is no possible 
8J 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


doubt of the fact that the church has lost its hold 
on the great masses of wage-earners! Fifty diver¬ 
gent reasons may be advanced in explanation, but 
the unpalatable fact remains. Those whom she 
ought to gather in with loving tenderness and 
care are absent from the fold. The Jesuits by 
every art accommodated the church to the world; 
the Dominicans, by their intellectual skill, pre¬ 
served and enforced the integrity of Catholic 
dogma; but the Franciscans, with girdle, staff, 
and feet shod with sandals, went about among 
the common people, teaching and preaching, and 
rendered enormous service to Rome by keeping 
the toiling millions in touch with a church or¬ 
ganization they had begun to regard with dislike. 
Will the Protestant church of to-day imitate the 
zeal and devotion, if it does not copy the methods, 
of the Franciscans in the effort to reclaim the 
alienated wage-earners? Certainly no one at all 
conversant with the real state of affairs will deny 
the words of a writer who says: “Go into the 
ordinary church on Sunday morning and you see 
lawyers, physicians, merchants, business men with 
their families; you see teachers, salesmen, clerks, 
with a proportion of educated mechanics; but the 
workingman and his household are not there.” 
And they never will be there until “that which 
82 



The Wage-Earner's Opinion. 

should be a corps in the host of a living God, now 
degraded to the position of a musico-religious 
club,” returns to its primal motive and purity. 
The separation between the church and the 
masses is broad, deep, and universal, with the 
single exception of the Church of Rome, which, 
whatever her faults, is still worshipfully demo¬ 
cratic. Will that chasm ever be bridged by Prot¬ 
estant Christianity? 

Here we reach a positively optimistic conclu¬ 
sion. I speak advisedly when I say Protestant¬ 
ism has become seriously alarmed at the drift of 
wage-earners from her churches. That alarm has 
been growing for ten years. It has taken deep 
hold on the minds of her ablest and most conse¬ 
crated servants. And the result is the phenome¬ 
nal growth of the idea of the institutional 
church. The writer, although comparatively 
young in the ministry, well remembers when this 
conception was nascent. Now it is spreading in 
every quarter like a ribbon of rosy light across a 
darkening sky. And the church of the next 
twenty years that refuses to harbor the institu¬ 
tional conception of work and influence, and to 
develop that conception to the best of its ability, 
will be doomed to extinction, and deservedly! 
Fear has begun to galvanize into life the dormant 
83 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


elements of a once Christly church, and the 
thought of a genuine brotherhood is now supple¬ 
menting the lower motive by the higher. 

Broadly speaking, the existing church condi¬ 
tions are yet demoralizing, unwholesome, and 
thoroughly unchristian. But the thin edge of a 
loftier purpose begins to feel its way. “The 
church that does not make itself a social power 
has little chance of growth.” This excerpt from 
an Evening Post editorial epitomizes a deep truth 
of experience. And in becoming a social power 
—that is, an uplifting influence in “education, 
charity, public health, economic welfare, and prac¬ 
tical politics”—the church radically alters its con¬ 
stitution and methods of work. So that the 
church of the future will not in the least resem¬ 
ble the church of the past. Here is another 
optimistic factor. The stress will be laid on a 
conception of religion which verily does the serv¬ 
ice of God in teaching how to make good bread 
in the cooking school no less than in the teaching 
of the ethical content of the Gospel from the pul¬ 
pit. The church of the past taught, “save your 
soul by dogma;” the institutional church will 
teach that he who seeks to save his soul by dogma 
leans on a broken reed. That church will say, 
“Look! Here are fields white to harvest. Men 
84 



The Wage-Earner's Opinion* 


suffer hunger, thirst, cry aloud in bitterness from 
the depths of crushing environment, lift their 
pale, wan faces to the brazen sky of social selfish¬ 
ness to discern one quivering rift of tenderness. 
Get hold of these men hand to hand, heart to 
heart, in the red, warm glow of real fraternity, 
and you shall save your soul by the self-revela¬ 
tion of its vastly nobler capabilities when enlisted 
in the work of the divine uplift of humanity.” 
The doctrine that a man must be urged to save his 
soul because of a personal and selfish fear that 
he may be lost, whatever the fate of others, is a 
dogma so abhorrent to the spirit of true religion 
that one is amazed to find it still prevalent in the¬ 
ology. And the broader conception of life and 
duty, as voiced by the enlargement of the office 
and work of the church, not only puts the quietus 
upon the wretched perversion of religion, but also 
awakens a glorious hope for the future of Chris¬ 
tianity. 

Will the transformed church win back its 
alienated millions of wage-earners ? It is doing 
just that wherever, in the few comparatively iso¬ 
lated instances, the church bravely builds on the 
indestructible foundation of a spiritual democ¬ 
racy. 


65 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


CHAPTER IX. 

MODERN CHURCH LIFE DEVELOPED BY MUTUALISM, 
NOT SOCIALISM. 

There are no more pregnant words in the 
New Testament than those contained in Mat¬ 
thew’s Gospel which read: “And all ye are 
brethren.” They are meant to apply to all cen¬ 
turies and to all races. There is no statute of 
limitations upon the ethical utterances of Jesus. 
The man who works for himself alone, though 
his name be heralded on two continents, is smaller 
than the dust of the balance before his Maker. 
Brotherhood is only Christhood written large in 
human souls. We arrive at this as the key of 
the verse just now quoted, and we also arrive at 
the doctrine of mutualism as the foundation on 
which all healthful church life depends. Mutual¬ 
ism is the first and last word of Christianity. By 
this is meant the reverse of individualism. By 
this we teach that men should work for and 
towards each other in common helpfulness in- 
86 



Mutualism and Church Life* 


stead of away from each other in common selfish¬ 
ness. Phillips Brooks, who proclaimed this doc¬ 
trine with characteristic and noble eloquence, says 
that mutualism is sometimes called socialism, 
sometimes communism. If so, not to be a so¬ 
cialist is not to be Christian. But as we interpret 
this great preacher and all who look to mutual¬ 
ism as the solvent of existing church conditions, 
the socialism implied is far from conveying cer¬ 
tain implications of a party of that name. His¬ 
torically, both communism and socialism are 
political and economic terms rather than moral or 
religious terms. They portray a theory of 
human society based on definite economic princi¬ 
ples whose truth or falsity forms no part of the 
present discussion. Mutualism is not a cult, an 
economic creed, or a series of maxims applied to 
existing industrial conditions. Rather is it, in 
the further language of Phillips Brooks, “the 
new life, where service is the universal law.” 
Thus understood it becomes the rule of conduct 
for the Christian world; the truth that builds 
human society into Christly relationships. What 
of its present status and recognition in the 
church ? 

One hazards nothing in saying that practically 
this doctrine of mutualism finds relatively feeble 

87 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


support in church circles where the type of 
churchianity considered in these pages obtains. 
The entire drift of church life is away from such 
ethical mooring. The complexity and multiplic¬ 
ity of modern life, the distractions of fashionable 
society, the cold formalism of worship, the con¬ 
stant obtrusion of financial considerations, and the 
iron inflexibility of the law of the “survival of the 
fittest”—all bear a part in submerging the 
Christly offices of mutualism. The tenets of so¬ 
ciety and business operate as centrifugal influ¬ 
ences to draw attention from the vital centripetal 
force of this principle which is the very heart of 
the Gospel. This fact precipitates the warfare be¬ 
tween those who would win the church back to 
her first allegiance, that doctrine which made Jul¬ 
ian tremble and shook the pillars of paganism, 
and those who are content with the churchly 
status quo —as long as the bills are paid! The 
marble-fronted churchly portals and the bolted 
gates, closed six days in the week, say, in effect, 
that mutualism is a pretty paper sentiment, but 
inapplicable where class conditions prevail. The 
awakened and prophetic spiritual instinct of cer¬ 
tain pulpits, dissatisfied with the attitude of the 
church, strenuously seeks to make this doctrine 
a living truth in the work of the organization, for 
88 



Mutualism and Church Life* 


it is rightly believed by such pulpits that unless 
the truth is restored to the place held in the first 
Christian century the church dies. And thus the 
battle is joined. 

Now in order that we may clearly apprehend 
what mutualism, as defined, signifies in ethical re¬ 
lations, let us take an illustration from Christian¬ 
ity as applied to the accumulation of wealth. 
Communism, in its last analysis, is always divi¬ 
sional of property either by voluntary consent as 
in the book of Acts where “they had all things 
in common,” or by the progressive legislation 
which lodges the sources of production in the state 
that a more even distribution of material benefits 
may ensue. This may be defended by good men 
under the guise of “Christian socialism,” and time 
may demonstrate the equity of the theory. But 
mutualism—where men move for and towards 
each other in common helpfulness—is not divi¬ 
sional nor distributive on any economic theory of 
property-holding. Nor does it seek by statute to 
remedy material maladjustments and meagre re¬ 
wards of toil. Mutualism simply means Chris¬ 
tian love in perpetual search for brotherly service, 
and the wealth of church members, on this view, 
is not only a trust from the Almighty, but it is 
also a trust whose sole vindication is the service 
89 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


it renders others. There are those who affirm we 
can never rely on the voluntary altruism of the 
wealthy. Hence, the state or municipality must 
‘‘saddle the gentleman,” as Mr. Stead puts it, 
with the duty of contributing in purse and person 
to the public welfare. For example, in a Swiss 
canton the college graduate and the inheritor of 
riches must serve the people by looking after the 
town pump if he does nothing more! Again we 
say the element of compulsion by law, however 
tenable as a theory of statecraft, does not enter 
into the conception of mutualism. That principle 
exacts service from those who adopt the Christly 
teaching of brotherhood, and its mainspring is 
love, not law. The Christian believer will see to 
it that his wealth in process of creation violates 
no ethical principle which God writes on the 
human conscience. He will also see to it that his 
wealth in process of distribution fulfills the mean¬ 
ing of Portia’s description of mercy, “It blesseth 
him that gives and him that takes.” 

Nor is it denied that wealth may be uncon¬ 
sciously altruistic. Bessemer, the inventor of a 
method of manufacturing steel by purifying iron 
from carbon through the introduction of oxygen, 
is said to have accumulated ten millions of dollars. 
He may not have given away one penny, but his 
90 



Mutualism an d Church Life* 


process, being of the highest industrial value, 
was probably worth uncounted millions to human¬ 
ity by furnishing a better tool presumably at 
lower ultimate cost. Yet no man has a right to 
shield himself behind the conception of uncon¬ 
scious altruism. Vastly more is demanded of 
him by the conditions of his discipleship. If he 
believes himself to be “bought with a price”—as 
the churches teach—and that price the “blood of 
Christ,” not one dollar is unreservedly his. For 
every thousand dollars of additional increment of 
money the Christian pledges himself anew to the 
divinely sanctioned disposal of the same. It must 
minister, over and above his modest personal 
needs, to the opening of channels through which 
the divine principle of brotherhood in action may 
flow. Even on the growing hypothesis of the 
uses of wealth, which is not distinctively Chris¬ 
tian in expression, the truth of C. W. Baker’s 
words is conceded by all just minds. And those 
words I find in his little book on monopolies, and 
reading as follows: “The amount of wealth 
which any man receives should bear some ap¬ 
proximate relation to the benefits which he con¬ 
fers upon the world.” Mutualism, then, in some 
form or other is imperatively the groundwork on 
which the church should build and enlarge. To 
9 \ 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


neglect the doctrine is to tear the very heart from 
the Gospel teaching. And we have employed the 
illustration of wealth because it is here that we 
find the prosperous church most recreant to her 
duty. 

He would be a bold man indeed who would 
claim that Christian wealth is in any sense conse¬ 
crated. Here and there in isolated cases it is. 
But the terrible indictment contained in Dr. 
Strong’s book entitled “Our Country” has never 
been met. If that book had never been written 
the personal experience of every keen observer of 
church conditions would be sufficient to substan¬ 
tiate our claim. And just at this point we dis¬ 
cover a sign of unquestioned optimistic value and 
significance. The Christian church is beginning 
profoundly to realize her own selfishness and in¬ 
difference to the principle of mutualism. Ought 
a Christian civilization, so called, to permit so 
much of heartache and misery in the world when 
its resources are so overpoweringly ample to 
relieve? One hears this question in circles where 
twenty years ago the mere suggestion would have 
subjected the questioner to the charge of unbelief. 
Dr. A. H. Bradford writes, “The very dissatisfac¬ 
tion with existing conditions is a sign of pro¬ 
gress.” Precisely so! Many true souls in the 
92 



Mutualism and Church Life. 


church, undaunted by the silly and sneering ac¬ 
cusation of pessimism, clearly perceive that 
Christian fraternity is more sentimental than real. 
And by persistently urging “back, back to the 
creed of mutualism as Jesus himself taught it,” 
they have set in motion such currents of church 
activity to-day as promise renewed invigoration 
with the primal impulse of Christianity. This 
fact is the good cheer of the present church situ¬ 
ation. The conditions are bad enough at the best, 
as I have tried faithfully to show. But a condi¬ 
tion is never irremediable when zones of light still 
belt the sky and the murmurings of protesting 
spirits quicken to reformatory action both the lazy 
and the laissez-faire! Your real pessimist is he 
who cries “peace” when there is no peace, and, 
ostrich-like, hides his head in the sand rather than 
face a grave peril determined to surmount it. 

I have in mind at this moment a portrait which 
so completely fulfils the meaning of mutualism as 
a law of Christian life and conduct that I will 
briefly sketch that portrait as the best object- 
lesson I know of the principle set forth. Some 
years ago there died in Toronto a well-known per¬ 
sonage, one of the most Christly and also one of 
the most churchly of men. Thrice was he elected 
Mayor of the city almost without opposition. 
93 



‘What is the Matte* with the Church? 


He refused the title of knighthood from the gov¬ 
ernment. His soul flamed with love for his kind. 
Of keenest business instincts, director of banks 
and companies innumerable, he voluntarily sur¬ 
rendered thousands and died comparatively poor 
because he sacrificed every investment and secur¬ 
ity on which he could not call down the blessing 
of heaven. He supported and endowed more 
than one rescue mission for fallen men and 
women. Every night after business hours he 
went out in search of some one to help. He gave 
thousands of dollars, a tenth, a fifth of his income 
in beneficence. To behold his face was an in¬ 
spiration. When he died all the city wept. 
Women in faded garments, and with pinched fea¬ 
tures; men toil-worn, horny-handed, bent with 
the strain of poverty; the high and the low; the 
banker and the beggar—all defiled before his 
coffin to look upon that calm, sweet face which 
bore in death the smile of God. And in fifty 
years he did his work and showed the world how 
true fraternity is the very breath and essence of 
the Gospel. 

In such a life we find the key to the new social 
order. That order, with the redemption of the 
church, will come not by class legislation nor by 
insistence upon religious dogma. It will come by 

94 



Mutualism and Church Life 


the conversion of churchianity into the fragrant 
bloom and flower of Christianity. It will come as 
light breaks in the east, crepuscular, faint, but 
glowing, and full of promise for the meridian. 
And the key to the arch will be the precious and 
indestructible stone of mutualism. 


95 


\ 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


CHAPTER X. 

LIGHT ON THE HORIZON. 

It must be apparent to all who follow the 
course of history that a certain degree of odium 
always attaches to that individual, however sin¬ 
cere his purpose, who reminds his fellow-men of 
disagreeable truths. Conservatism, securely in¬ 
trenched behind precedent and tradition, turns a 
deaf ear to venturesome scouts traversing the 
enemies’ country and warning the besieged that 
mines are ready to be sprung beneath such de¬ 
fences. And when the danger can be no longer 
disguised, instead of quick rally to repair the mis¬ 
chief and repel the invader, the uncompromising 
conservative wastes precious time in heaping upon 
the unfortunate prophet bitter denunciation. Not 
that it would be wise to displace the conservative 
of reasonable temper and intelligence. In all 
economy of thought and effort a judicious mix¬ 
ture of caution and boldness is essential to the 
preservation of that equipoise of mind whose 
96 



Light on the Horizon* 


steadiness is the guarantee of solid and assured 
results.: But the conservatism which, “having 
eyes will not see, having ears will not hear,” in¬ 
sists that all other eyes and ears reporting grave 
lurking perils are credulous and deceived, is a 
conservatism most responsible for ultimate loss 
and ruin. Such habit of thought in the church 
will suffer rude awakening before the heavy hand 
of existing untoward conditions is removed from 
the Ark of God. 

Historically, was there ever a time when earn¬ 
est reformers were not looked upon as visionary 
and impracticable since the day when Pope Leo 
X. contemptuously referred to the Lutheran out¬ 
break as a “squabble of monks?” Historically, 
was there ever a time when the timidity of the let- 
alone policy in church and state, loving peace 
more than the truth that wins by blood and tears, 
did not say: “What is the use of stirring up de¬ 
bate? Why not let things go on as they are?” 
Historically, was there ever a time when Christ’s 
own words did not apply to the preaching of His 
truth: “Think not that I came to send peace on 
the earth. I came not to send peace but a 
sword”? Particularly is this so when the de¬ 
claration of many bold thinkers in sermons and 
books, calling attention to the evils in church life 
97 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


portrayed in these papers, also involve the per¬ 
formance of duties and services now habitually 
shirked or evaded. Consequently, it is not to be 
expected that messages hot from anxious minds 
and hearts, foreboding evils clearly demonstrable 
from a candid survey of church life, will receive 
more than cold welcome from traditional church- 
ianity. Consolation must then be found in the 
words of the ancient, burning with his message 
but fearful of its reception, “Strike but Hear!” 
He who lodges a germ of thought even in hardest 
soil, with the bare chance of grain to sprout from 
the fruitful seed, may well be content to be 
harshly ordered from the premises by the police 
officer of traditionalism now that his seed is sown. 

And herein lies the great and conspicuous op¬ 
timistic factor in the entire present discussion of 
churchly tendencies. The dry, baked, impene¬ 
trable crust of churchly indifference to the inward 
truth and power of the ethics of the Gospel at 
length begins to soften under the smiting blows 
of fearless thought-leaders in the bosom of the 
church. The massive framework of its tradi¬ 
tional theology rocks and quivers beneath the im¬ 
pact of that impressive Thor's hammer of the 
nineteenth century—the onward and unfaltering 
march of scientific knowledge, broadening to the 
93 



Light on the Horizon . 

widest confines of ethical illumination. A new 
flame begins to burn upon the watch-towers of 
Zion, feebly at first, and but a disc of light sur¬ 
rounded by mediaeval shadows, but beaconing 
forth as it grows in steadiness the promise of the 
earlier and glorious days of Christian faith. 
That flame is the awakened consciousness of mul¬ 
titudes in the church, that a pagan, “suckled in a 
creed outworn,” is a manlier man than he who. 
while nominally accepting the ethics of Jesus as 
of Divine authority and sanction, virtually denies 
the application of that ethical teaching to the so¬ 
cial and industrial relations of his time. In 
magazine, pamphlet, book, and sermon there rings 
the accusing chorus of voices calling upon a re¬ 
creant church to return to the simplicity, beauty, 
tenderness, sincerity, and spiritual democracy of 
the period when the Gospel knew not fear nor 
favor before the rich and haughty; when lord and 
serf melted in common love and kinship as each 
partook of the mystic symbols of the Saviour's 
passion in the bare “upper room.” And in this 
growing volume of enlightened knowledge as to 
the real ethical teaching of the Gospel of the Man 
of Nazareth, I find a bow of radiant promise span¬ 
ning the sky of the long, dark years of fashion 
and formality in worship, and we are beginning to 
99 


LofC. 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


perceive with exultant eyes that the “Church of 
the Open Door” obtains a foothold, while the 
church built upon class distinctions is driven to 
its illogical and pernicious defensive. 

Nor is it to be presumed that such vantage- 
ground has been secured without such intensity 
of feeling as often attends clashing methods, vari¬ 
ant conceptions, and disturbed organic relations. 
The writer has preserved a mass of testimony 
from the lips of preachers and teachers confirma¬ 
tory of the positions maintained in this book, 
but a small part of which has been quoted. 
Reading between the lines of such voluminous 
testimony, one who knows the situation in modern 
ministerial circles will be painfully conscious of 
the cost of such deliverances. The preachers of 
to-day whose work falls into line with the general 
tenor of the newer thought take upon themselves 
a vast personal risk. They must meet the charge 
of doctrinal laxity; suffer under the imputation 
of 1 being seekers after notoriety; bear in silence 
the time-honored allegation that he who wanders 
from the beaten path of precedent is a disturber 
of the peace; repel the invectives of the thought¬ 
less, who cry “pessimist” to him who seeing evil 
lays it bare. They must also, not infrequently, 
mourn over the estrangement of personal friends, 
*00 



Light on the Horizon. 


and probably witness the desertion from the par¬ 
ish of family after family, because of personal 
irritation at the faithfulness of the pulpit word. 
I am able to put my finger upon men who have 
endured all this—and more—and yet with “high¬ 
heartedness” and undimmed devotion to truth, 
go their “painful way in the world with a smile 
in the soul,” as George Sand wrote of Balzac. 
Their prayer is the noble aspiration of Theodore 
Parker: 

“Give me, Lord, eyes to behold the truth; 

A seeing sense that knows the eternal right; 

A heart with pity filled, and gentlest ruth. 

A manly faith that makes all darkness light. 

Give me the power to labor for mankind: 

Make me the mouth of such as cannot speak; 

Eyes let me be to groping men and blind; 

A conscience to the base, and to the weak 
Let me be hands and feet ” 

All hail to these prophets of the better day wait¬ 
ing for the church of God, for by their unyielding 
devotion to the long-buried ethical teachings of the 
Gospel, and by their brave refusal to compromise 
with hollow ecclesiasticism, veneered by fashion 
and upholstered with religious conventionality, 

m 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


they have compelled recognition of thoughts and 
ideals imperishable. They have begun a work of 
restoration by seeming to assail the very pillars of 
the temple. And all the helpful light which now 
is shed upon the condition of the church—deplor¬ 
able as that condition is—radiates from pulpits 
where counsels of expediency suppress not one 
iota of the truth which makes for social righteous¬ 
ness. 

We have, then, abundant encouragement in 
the fact that the hardened crust of churchly in¬ 
difference to the sublime mission and purpose of 
its Founder shows signs of breaking, and this 
because of the self-sacrificing manhood of reli¬ 
gious leaders who esteem it a privilege to follow 
in the footsteps of Kingsley, Maurice, and Ruskin 
in place of worshipping before the dead altars 
of a fashionable and formal churchianity. There 
is ever a church within a church. Whenever the 
formal church has laid its cold, deadening touch 
upon the vital warmth and zeal eternally at the 
heart of the Gospel of Jesus the bondage of the 
letter has ultimately been broken by some marvel¬ 
lous renewal of spiritual force and energy. So 
will it be in the future. The ultimate form to be 
assumed by Christianity, both in restatement of 
doctrine and in the readjustment of its life to so- 
W2 



Light on the Horizon. 


cial and industrial conditions, is a matter of con¬ 
jecture. But one thing is certain—the church of 
the predominant type in cities hastens to its ex¬ 
tinction. The church which makes its faith and 
practice conformable to the high and holy teaching 
of Jesus, to the remotest ethical implication, is the 
only church that will vindicate its right to exist. 
The one expresses merely churchianity, the device 
of man; the other 4 represents Christianity, not 
the only true religion, but the only religion which 
best meets the multiform needs and yearnings of 
humanity, because of its wider sweep and the 
clearer revelation of the divinity within our¬ 
selves. That church, with but the loss of a single 
word, realizes the dream of Akbar as portrayed 
by Tennyson: 


“I dreamed 

That stone by stone I rear’d a sacred fane, 

A Temple, neither Pagod, Mosque, 

But loftier, simpler, always open-door’d 
To every breath from heaven: and Truth and 
Peace 

And Love and Justice came and dwelt therein.” 

On the English coast there is a fountain within 
high-water mark on the seashore. Twice a day 

*03 



What is the Matte* with the Church? 


the tide spreads over it, and the pure, sweet water 
is defiled and spoiled by the salt, bitter waves. 
But the tide goes down, and the fountain washes 
itself clear from the defilement. And when the 
troubled ocean subsides the cup of refreshment 
may be put to thirsty lips, undiminished and un¬ 
sullied. So springs the water of life from the 
ever-open fountain of the Christly teaching. The 
salt tide of worldliness sweeps over it in vain. 
The bitter waves of encroaching churchianity sup¬ 
press but do not stop the flow. The crested foam 
of centuries of theological strife will one day re¬ 
cede and the fountain will be there upon the shore 
of man’s deepest spiritual need, uncorrupted as 
in the day when the Samaritan woman partook 
of it at Jacob’s well. For, “until the stars grow 
cold : and the leaves of the Judgment book un¬ 
fold,” there shall not arise a greater than He who 
said, “Come unto Me, all ye that are weary and 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” “Many 
there be who say that our Christian civilization is 
mortal like every other from the Chaldean down; 
that this sacred river is on its way to the bitter 
sea; is already shooting the rapids. Hermon, 
with its transfiguring glory, far behind; Galilee, 
with its Cana and beatitudes, behind; the Judean 
hills that are round-about Jerusalem sinking one 
*04 



Light on the Horizon* 


by one. But fear not. Declension is not apos¬ 
tasy; discipline is not destruction. It is the bit¬ 
terness of the sea, not the sweetness of the river 
that is doomed. Consider, O consider, the vision 
of the Prophet. The little stream from under 
the threshold of the Sanctuary, rising to the 
ankles, to the knees, to the loins, becomes a river 
in which to swim, and the waters of the sea are 
healed.” 

When shall we have a Christian civilization? 
When the ethics of Jesus are exalted, hot ob¬ 
scured, by a church that dares not live up to their 
reality. 


*05 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


CHAPTER XI. 

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NEW MOVEMENT 
IN THEOLOGY. 

In our survey of existing church affairs we 
have already briefly considered the relation which 
new theology sustains to such conditions. We 
now desire to point out what, in our judgment, 
really constitutes the pith of the modern move¬ 
ment in theology. And it is but fair to say, in the 
beginning, that at the present time in the ranks of 
every Protestant sect, three opposing tendencies 
of opinion are clearly discernible. 

First, we encounter cautious conservatism, able, 
upright, influential, but dogmatic and positive 
in the belief that Macaulay was right, when he 
said, “Natural Theology is not a progressive 
science.” Apparently, its representatives have 
more regard for authority than for spiritual con¬ 
sciousness in religion; and they seem disposed to 
undervalue the nobility of spiritual manhood, 
when somewhat inimical to the rigid requirements 

m 



Characteristics of New Theology* 


of historical Orthodoxy. Personally devout, 
such conservatism is the high sheriff who arrests 
every loiterer in fields of thought that are fresh 
and new. 

Next, we meet with a class of laymen and 
preachers who are practically religious agnostics. 
They do not know where they stand, and are not 
unlike Daniel Webster’s opponent in a civil cause, 
of whom the great lawyer said: “This man 
neither alights nor flies. He hovers!” Drifting 
with every tide, they hope eventually to grasp 
some floating spar on which they may reach a 
firm shore. 

Midway between the conservative and ration¬ 
alistic poles there has arisen a third tendency of 
opinion, generally described as the “New Move¬ 
ment,” whose sign-manual is not yet complete, 
but whose dawning light already flushes the sky 
with the crimson of a fairer morning. This 
movement is rarely understood except by those 
who have been divinely called to become its pio¬ 
neers. How can it be otherwise? What do the 
inhabitants of those regions nearest the poles 
know of the habits and conditions of dwellers in 
the temperate zone ? The positions of conservative 
and rationalist are so remote from the ground oc¬ 
cupied by those who accept the new views that 
*07 




What is the Matter with the Church? 


they cannot fairly interpret the scope and bearing 
of the movement. In fairness, it must also be 
admitted that the advanced thought is not yet able 
adequately to set forth its own purposes and 
limitations. But this is by no means discredit¬ 
able, since all progress begins with vague yearn¬ 
ings and noble aspirations that stir the soul and 
fire the brain before the busy logic adapts intelli¬ 
gent means to definite ends. The plough up¬ 
heaves the soil many a day before the seed sprouts 
into golden grain. We live in the period of 
stormy thought upheaval. Our children will 
gather in the fruits. 

And yet the new movement in theology has 
already taken on certain features that serve to 
show how useful and beneficent is its mission. 
There are voices in the air that whisper sublime 
words of spiritual hope, and there are pens that 
are writing the epitaph of every system of exclu¬ 
sion and denunciation in religion. The funda¬ 
mental tenet of the movement we are considering, 
the central truth on which it depends, asserts the 
enlargement of the spiritual horizon through ever- 
widening knowledge, that grows out of progres¬ 
sive thinking. History powerfully sustains the 
proposition. The heretic of to-day is the con¬ 
servative of to-morrow. Areas of commonplace 

m 



Characteristics of New Theology, 


facts were formerly the battlefields of advancing 
science. The despised reformer after his death 
becomes the canonized seer. Theological systems 
and social fabrics are but “mile-stones, showing 
how far yesterday’s thought has traveled,” as 
Wendell Phillips said of the written law. It is a 
familiar lesson that the most pronounced opinions 
of the present, viewed in the clearer light of the 
future, may be more empty of truth than the as¬ 
tronomical speculations of a horde of savages. 
Recognizing such possibilities, inseparable from 
the capacity of truth for infinite enlargement, the 
movement described is yet catholic enough in its 
scope to include all that is best and truest in the 
venerable past. And this I suggest as its first 
characteristic:— 

i. The new views do not arbitrarily break with 
the older systems of theological belief. 

•It is incredible that such intellectual giants as 
the ages have produced in the arena of theological 
strife should bring forth nothing of permanent 
value. The great historic creeds of the Church, 
the matured fruits of their labors, are not so 
many articles of useless lumber in the storehouse 
of antiquity. Augustine, Edwards, and the 
fathers of the Nicene Council thought for immor¬ 
tality as certainly as Milton’s “heretics in the 
\09 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


truth.” The esteem in which these ancient con¬ 
fessions are held by the adherents of the new 
movement is amply set forth in the records of 
recent installing councils. But this very assent 
carries with it an implied denial of those features 
of the older theology that do not seem to meet the 
requirements of present day scholarship and re¬ 
ligious knowledge. The relation, therefore, be¬ 
tween the old and new is one of economy. As 
Samson brought the honey from the carcass of 
the lion, so will the Broad Church of to-day ex¬ 
tract “sweetness and light” from the dead past, 
neglecting no treasure that ministers to the spirit¬ 
ual need. The purpose is to assail only those 
views of God and religion which, by their sincere 
falsity, have, in days gone by, contributed to dis¬ 
honor His character and diminish the vitality of 
spiritual power. And with this purpose there is 
associated a supreme endeavor to make prominent 
the simple yet eternal verities of religion, that are so 
grandly emphasized in the historic creeds. In such 
a movement there is no room for raging icono¬ 
clasts, tearing down but never building; no place 
for intemperate Don Quixotes, running tilts 
against everything fixed and stable. Character 
and motives are not impugned. Opinions alone 
are condemned. It is not the intention to draw a 

no 



Characteristics o f New Theology. 

line of demerit between past and present belief. 
Whatever commends itself to the spiritual con¬ 
sciousness of men, whether spoken by Athanasius 
or Channing, is accepted as a divine message; 
and the most earnest prayer we breathe is that 
offered by the dying Goethe, “More light!” 

2. But it is sometimes charged that the move¬ 
ment in question is characterized by laxity of be¬ 
lief. I shall throw down the gauntlet with con¬ 
siderable vehemence at this point, and boldly aver 
that the movement is really remarkable for great 
positiveness of conviction, which I name as its 
second characteristic. It must not be forgotten 
that the new theology is theology; that is to say, 
it has definite words to utter about God, Christ, 
and the soul, which affirm all that the Bible 
affirms of spiritual realities. It stands squarely 
on the New Testament basis. The “eternal veri¬ 
ties” of the older creeds, of which I have spoken, 
are engraved upon the very heart of the move¬ 
ment that is new. 

But the new theology will not be wise above 
what is written. The fundamental facts of 
revealed religion are received in their sim¬ 
plicity. Theories about the application of the 
facts to the spiritual needs of men are not formu¬ 
lated. Thus, we are agreed upon the truth that 




What is the Matter with the Church? 


“God was in Christ reconciling the world unto 
himself;” but we do not attempt to unravel the 
interior workings of the divine nature, that 
clothes the man of Nazareth with the habiliments 
of the unusual and the incomparable. In like 
manner, the doctrine of the Trinity is accepted for 
its practical worth, as a revelation of the many- 
sidedness of God; while all endeavors to define 
the doctrine, on the basis of tri-personality, are 
abandoned to those ingenious persons who are 
fond of enigmas. Similarly, the doctrines of the 
atonement and retribution after death are held as 
moral and religious certainties; while the method 
of the one and the exact duration of the other 
are included among the things that St. Peter 
speaks of as “hard to be understood.” Actually, 
the phase of thought we are considering posi¬ 
tively declares the true principles of spiritual 
Christianity, such as prevailed in the first Chris¬ 
tian century. It is a revival of the oldest of the 
old theology. Its mission is to make the narra¬ 
tive teaching of the four evangelists the lumi¬ 
nous center of all spiritual knowledge. 

Yet, with a positive purpose, the movement 
tends toward broadness in its grasp of principles; 
and the underlying principle of all asserts the in¬ 
tegrity of truth, that must not be violated at any 
U2 



Characteristics of New Th eology♦ 

cost. Whoever suffers, whatever falls, truth, 
sacred, lofty, eternal, must be sought and found. 
No traditions, as false as they are hoary; no dicta 
of ecclesiasticism, riddled with venerable errors; 
no chains of churchly authority, burning as they 
chafe, must be allowed to impede the progress of 
the soul in its search after truth. The maxim is, 
On the sea of human thought there is space for 
every sail! Let the gospel of progress have free 
wings! 

3. And, precisely at this stage of our inquiry, 
we touch upon a third characteristic of the new 
theology, that may be described as a demand for 
spiritual freedom. The inquisitorial spirit yet 
lingers in the bosom of the Church, but happily 
with diminishing power and virulence. The 
leaven of a larger liberty and a broader toler¬ 
ance is beginning to work. The lions of eccle¬ 
siastical tyranny may still roar, and loudly too; 
but it is easy to see that they are chained. And 
yet there is enough of the old narrowness remain¬ 
ing to make the appeal for spiritual freedom a 
legitimate cry. I need only to mention the re¬ 
cent Briggs controversy in proof of this state¬ 
ment. Until councils invariably ordain to the 
ministry men who are orthodox on every point 
but that of eternal punishment, while sternly 
U3 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


holding to the law of present and future retribu¬ 
tion ; until suspicion and disfavor, not to say mis¬ 
representation, are withdrawn from men who are 
adding many jewels to their crowns in the salva¬ 
tion of souls, though reputed heretics in point of 
doctrine; until the great leaders of this movement 
at home and abroad are heard without prejudice 
and judged without bitterness,—there is room in 
the evangelical body for a wider Christian liberty. 

I see no reason why the attitude of every Chris¬ 
tian thinker should not correspond to that as¬ 
sumed by a famous English essayist, who said, 
‘‘I do not look upon an opponent as an enemy to 
be repelled, but as a torch-bearer to be welcomed 
for any light he may bring.” Worthy to be taken 
as a companion truth is the declaration of Cole¬ 
ridge : “There are errors that no wise man will 
treat with rudeness while there is a possibility 
that they may be the refraction of some great 
light still below the horizon.” It is the unfet¬ 
tered mind that grows. It is the unhindered out¬ 
look that sweeps the clear heavens. The truth 
of God cannot be shut up in the old measures. 
The new wine of to-day will burst the old bottles 
of yesterday, just as the new wine of yesterday 
foamed its way out of the old bottles of the day ' 
before. The life of God in the soul cannot be 

m 



Characteristics of New Theology* 

confined within the formal limits of a particular 
creed. Thought must range wherever it will in 
the harvest-field of truth. 

4. But the attractiveness of such a spiritual 
habit must not divert our attention from a fourth 
marked characteristic of the new theology. It is 
unlike all previous movements of advanced re¬ 
ligious thought. I do not mean that it is differ¬ 
ent only, for this fact is but a platitude. Thought 
movements are never cast in exactly the same 
mold, though they often have a family resem¬ 
blance. Yet the new theology is so thoroughly 
unique in purpose and tendency that its unlike¬ 
ness to past upheavals must everywhere be recog¬ 
nized as one of its important features. Two his¬ 
torical developments of theological speculation 
are sometimes placed in agreement with the 
movement we are discussing. I refer to the rise 
of English Deism in the last century, and to the 
Unitarian controversy in Massachusetts, which 
began at a considerably later period. 

In regard to the first, it may be said that its 
starting-point was a disbelief in the possibility of 
revelation. The wearisome conflict of theologi¬ 
cal parties impelled some to explore for a creed 
which could be held by all in common. The prin¬ 
ciples of natural religion were thus adopted. 
U5 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


The movement discredited Christian faith and 
forsook the Christian Church. The new views 
of to-day are as remote from those described as 
the east is from the west. The new thought is 
firmly planted upon the fact of revelation; it as¬ 
serts the supremacy of faith; its aim is not sep¬ 
aration from the evangelicalbody, but enlighten¬ 
ment within the Christian Church. 

Nor is the historical basis of the Unitarian con¬ 
troversy parallel with the prime intention of the 
later thought. That conflict originated in a 
strong revolt against certain doctrines of ex¬ 
treme Calvinism, and the battle was fought on 
dogmatic issues alone. The famous disputes be¬ 
tween Moses Stuart and Dr. Channing were only 
a series of doctrinal polemics. But the drift of 
the present movement is not dogmatic, but spirit¬ 
ual. Life is put before doctrine, though the im¬ 
portance of right belief is duly considered. To 
make men Christ-like is the supreme purpose. * 
Whatever contributes to this end is eagerly seized 
upon as legitimate vantage-ground. A larger, 
nobler, grander future for the Church is prom¬ 
ised through a practical realization of ideal man- 1 
hood in Christ Jesus. In such a movement there 
is found a quality of thinking that will ultimately 
harmonize the various parties in the Church, in- 

m 



Characteristics of New Theology, 


stead of provoking fresh divisions and sharper 
strifes, which is the usual fate of advancing re¬ 
ligious thought. Not in our day, not in our 
children’s day, but in the heart of the religious 
consciousness of the world’s to-morrow will blos¬ 
som that fragrant flower of spiritual beauty 
which is named Christian unity! 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


CHAPTER XII. 

CHRISTIANITY IN ITS RELATION TO THE IDLE RICH 
AND THE IDLE POOR. 

In the story of the Garden of Eden we read 
that God condemned Adam to hard labor for life 
because of his sin. Hear the sentence: “In the 
sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread until thou 
return unto the ground.” Ham not sure, how¬ 
ever, that this allotment is a condemnation. 
Charles Lamb said, that Adam luckily sinned 
himself out of the garden! I am not certain 
about the cause of his departure, but I am posi¬ 
tive that Adam, as a man, would probably have 
died of weariness had he remained in that garden 
always without work. It takes the simon-pure 
tramp to find the same pleasure in doing nothing 
that most men discover in doing something! 
Adam had not the instincts of the tramp in this 
respect. Therefore he did well to go out of 
Eden. Personally, I attach slight historical sig¬ 
nificance to this story. We believe in evolution. 
We believe that men have fought their way up, 
step by step, from the dark shadows of brutish 

m 



Idle Rich And the Idle Poof. 


condition; and, with the incoming of reason, 
mind, and soul, they have wrested from the earth 
the elements of that material splendor which 
crowns our civilization. No other result was 
possible. To live they must eat; to eat they must 
toil, and spin, and plant, and reap; and, with 
labor of hand and fret of mind, they started that 
sweat upon the brow the rain from which has 
beautified the face of all centuries and watered 
the soil of industrial productivity. There is no 
more righteous enactment in all the universe than 
this, “If a man will not work, neither shall he 
eat.” That settles forever the status of the cor¬ 
ner loafer and the unregenerated dude. Which 
is the worse I do not know. In the attempt to 
decide I am like Father Taylor, the great sailor- 
preacher, who, upon the refusal of a Methodist 
minister to enter his pulpit because a Unitarian 
was there, fell upon his knees and cried out be¬ 
fore the whole audience: “O Lord, deliver us 
here in Boston from bad rum and bigotry: Thou 
knowest which is worst, but I don’t!” Whether 
the lazy tough, reeking with whisky and pounc¬ 
ing upon the unwary stranger, is not, upon the 
whole, less objectionable than the dissipated 
“chappy” spending his unearned money on dis¬ 
reputable actresses, is a pretty serious question. 
\\9 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


One is rich, very likely, because his father struck 
oil; the other poor because he hates to work. 
Both are like old-man-of-the-sea on the backs of 
honest workingmen. A rich and idle roue, in 
his teens, ought to be whipped and sent to bed; 
the corner loafer ought to be starved into labor. 
And here I leave them. 

But now, on this general question of eating and 
working as related to the idle rich and the idle 
poor, what is to be said? I am stirred to this 
subject by a recent editorial in a certain journal, 
which begged of the public to remember that 
over-refined charity, in its zeal to discourage the 
unworthy poor, might fail in remembering that 
the idle rich were equally reprehensible. The 
point is well taken, and, I desire to go into this a 
little, hoping both to deal justly and show mercy. 
And will the reader permit me to do this in a 
series of related propositions? 

And (i) who are meant by the idle poor? 
Well, no one class answers to this definition. 
Types are varied. There is, for example, the 
Sam Lawson type of the village story-teller, cele¬ 
brated in Mrs. Stowe’s “Oldtown Folks,” who 
sits on a fence-rail, whittling and spinning yarns, 
while his wife struggles to keep the wolf from 
the door and the. children go ragged and un- 
*20 



Idle Rich And the Idle Poof. 


kempt. This class, good-natured and rarely 
vicious, simply runs to incorrigible laziness, and 
some very agreeable vagabonds, of the Rip Van 
Winkle ordei, belong to it. There is also the 
migratory class, born to restlessness and tramp- 
hood, continually on the road because travel 
without funds is more desirable than labor with 
funds. These are the individuals who take your 
bread and butter humbly at the door, and fling the 
gift away on turning the corner because a chalk- 
mark on the fence says to the brotherhood, “Stop 
here and you’ll get rolls and coffee, with a rasher 
of bacon.” Weed out the really unfortunate from 
this class, and you have possibly one sheep to 
every fifty goats—except in extraordinary times, 
when worthy men are on the road by thousands, 
discharged from industrial centers for causes 
variously interpreted by economists. We have 
also the incompetent idle poor—people who are in 
a chronic state of distress, work or no work, simply 
on account of their ignorance of management. 
They have never been taught the art of saving. 
The wages dribble out with nothing to show but 
debts, when another family, next door, on the 
same wage, puts money in the bank every pay¬ 
day. The first family is neither vicious nor 
recklessly extravagant; only ignorant of ways 
\ 2 \ 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


and means of successful housekeeping. Debt 
discourages the father; discouragement impairs 
the quality of his work; this in turn puts a more 
skilful man in his place, and he joins the ranks 
of the unemployed. 

But we must not review at length these vari¬ 
ous types. We proceed, therefore, to say that 
we have in mind in this address the deserving 
idle poor—men and women who have the same 
right to bread and butter that we possess who are 
more favored in the distribution of products; 
men and women whose hearts are sometimes bit¬ 
ter with a sense of outrage and injury, in that 
willingness and ability to work, with self-respect 
as the basis of character, find no market. In 
extraordinary times of industrial depression the 
name of the deserving idle poor is legion; nay, 
more, there is a class, much larger, equally de¬ 
serving, employed at such pitifully low wages 
that their life is hardly more enviable than that 
of the unemployed. But the worthy idle poor, 
relatively few in times of normal industrial activ¬ 
ity, relatively many in period of great industrial 
depression, the whilom workers at loom and 
forge, shall they be forbidden to eat because they 
cannot work? The idle poor man produces 
nothing: is he entitled to some of the fruits of the 
122 



Idle Rich and the Idle Poof. 


joint productivity of others? The idle poor 
man, deserving, in time past has helped create the 
enormous aggregate wealth of the country. 
Does the country owe him anything over and 
above the wages already paid him? If society 
cannot give him work, shall society bestow 
bread? And is the bread a gift, or a portion of 
debt discharged? In other words, has the in¬ 
dustrious, sober workingman, in prosperous days, 
received his rightful share of the aggregate in¬ 
crease of national wealth? This debt is unre¬ 
quited, according to Henry George, Ferdinand 
Lassalle, and other profound students of social 
progress. It is a debt more than requited, ac¬ 
cording to Edward Atkinson, the laissez faire 
school, and the mass of capitalists. I suggest 
these questions. I have no space to discuss 
them. At present, in answer to my own ques¬ 
tion, who are meant by the deserving idle poor? 
I reply, men and women willing to work, of good 
habits, industrious and frugal, who, by reason of 
some phenomenal dullness in trade, or sickness, or 
any other defensible hindrance to saving, are now 
penniless, and, unless the rent be paid, homeless. 
What will you do for these? 

But suffer me at this point to proceed with a 
second inquiry, and to ask, (2) Who are meant 
123 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


by the idle rich? Here, again, the vast scope of 
the topic compels suggestion in place of argu¬ 
ment, and I must once more advance a series of 
propositions to be accepted or rejected accord¬ 
ing to their soundness. To begin' with, I affirm: 

( a ) An idle rich man is he who does little or 
nothing for his fellow-men. He may toil like a 
galley-slave in heaping up money. If he spends 
that money in a wholly selfish manner, or hoards 
'it avariciously, he is contemptible in the sight of 
God. It will not do to say, for instance, that he 
helps his fellow-men by giving them work in 
putting up a magnificent house. For, in the first 
place, the equivalent of money spent in building 
the house is locked up in the edifice, and is there¬ 
fore valueless except to flatter vanity; whereas, 
if invested in some manufacturing or other indus¬ 
trial plant, employment is given for a long term 
of years, invention stimulated, and productivity 
increased. And, in the second place, he who 
builds a palatial residence does it for his own 
gratification, and not infrequently to outshine his 
neighbors, without a thought of helping his fel¬ 
low-creatures. I do not say that there are not 
circumstances which justify a man in building 
such a house. I am simply urging that he has no 
right to put it down as a benevolent contribution. 

m 



Idle Rich and the Idle Poor« 


A rich man who works for himself all the time 
may die of nervous prostration through such de¬ 
votion to business; nevertheless, his character 
has been unimproved in brotherliness, which is 
the essence of Christianity, and his money has 
brought forth nothing but money. In the pres¬ 
ence of God he is empty-handed. 

(b) An idle rich man is he who gains his 
wealth by other processes than those of honest in¬ 
dustry. All wealth must come to the individual 
in one of five ways: i. By earning. 2. By in¬ 
heritance. 3. By gift outright. 4. By lucky dis¬ 
covery. 5. By stealing. I believe that stealing 
is looked upon with such general disfavor in 
civilized communities that I am justified in dis¬ 
missing this method at once! Earned wealth 
alone represents the output of labor. Something 
remains to show for it as product. Inheritance, 
when the property that falls to another is the fruit 
of honest industry, is simply earned wealth trans¬ 
mitted in trust. Gift is usually the reward of affec« 
tion; and, while it is true that the person who re¬ 
ceives money by gift or inheritance did not earn 
it, the holding thereof is just, on condition that 
the money be used in such a way as to promote, 
not alone the pleasure of the recipient, but also 
the best interests of human society. Hence 
*25 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


people who inherit money they did not earn 
should be doubly solicitous to retain it on the 
basis of Christian stewardship, which means a 
portion of the income conscientiously expended 
in doing good, and the principle guarded from all 
shady transactions. Now, the man who acquires 
wealth by any method save that of honest indus¬ 
try, with these reservations applied, is simply a 
gambler in possibilities more or less questionable. 
If he works fifteen hours a day, he may still be an 
idler, as regards the necessities of his fellow- 
men, and a laggard in every good cause. Your 
mere speculator is bound to win on the toss of his 
coin. He may toss that coin all day long until 
his arm is weary, and “heads” may fall three 
times out of four, but this man may be of no more 
value in the kingdom of God than the Eastern 
beggar that dogs the footsteps of the traveler. 
And certain streets in America are full of idle men 
of this description. 

But (c) an idle rich man is he who encourages 
his family in foolish and wanton luxury. The 
inequalities in human society would not prove so 
menacing to our civilization were it not for the 
vulgar and ostentatious show of some wealthy 
people. We insist that the head of the family 
shares in the idleness of its members by allowing 
126 



Idle Rich and the Idle Poor, 


the gratification of every luxurious whim; and, if 
he lacks the power to forbid such display, he should 
abdicate his position as the head of the family! 
Complicity in a fault is to commit that fault one’s 
self. If I permit stealing when I can stop it, 
although I am not a thief, I am touched by the 
pitch of his crime. The foolish weakness of 
many a hard-working capitalist in allowing his 
wife and daughters to spend with criminal 
prodigality when noble charities go begging for 
funds, transfers to his shoulders, vicariously, the 
righteous popular condemnation of their selfish 
idleness. We read that in New York a poor sew¬ 
ing-woman is found starving, her children beside 
her, and in the very next paragraph of the same 
paper we read that a society woman bought a 
diamond necklace for a poodle! Still further on 
we discover that Mr. and Mrs. W— have per¬ 
sonally investigated cases of distress brought to 
their notice by a newspaper, and have spent more 
than one thousand dollars in relief. Which 
family, think you, deserves to be perpetuated? 
I have no great affection for certain magnates of 
the Standard Oil Company. I believe, upon the 
whole, that the methods of the Standard Oil cor¬ 
poration have inflicted a greater injury upon pub¬ 
lic morals than any possible cheapness of product 
127 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


can wipe out. But I do applaud the manner in 
which one magnate brings up his children to 
economy, plainness of dress, systematic benevo¬ 
lence, and that self-respect which forbids the 
flaunting of their riches in the faces of the poor. 
And I hold, in general, that for every diamond 
added to the jeweled fingers of wealth, for every 
new and sumptuous appointment of house and 
household, there is involved a moral obligation to 
do more in philanthropy. The greater one's abil¬ 
ity to spend on one’s self, the greater the claim of 
humanitarian service. And I repeat that prodi¬ 
gal luxury argues complicity with blameworthy 
family idleness, whatever may be the individual 
industry of the head of the establishment. 

And thus we might go on to show in certain 
other particulars how the common talk about the 
idle poor must be supplemented with equally just 
criticisms upon the idle rich, if one would faith¬ 
fully interpret the verse which insists that bread 
shall be dependent upon work. We are not dis¬ 
couraging wealth. Far from it. I wish some 
people might be vastly richer than they are. I am 
not speaking of the man who, by a life of honorable 
business activity, replete with generous deeds and 
services, accumulates a competency, and spends 
the evening of his days in rest and travel, while 



Idle Rich and the Idle Poor. 


his thoughtfulness in charity continues. Such a 
man is a blessing to the church and community in 
which he lives. I have in mind that idle and sel¬ 
fish career whose bank account of noble deeds is 
always low, whose powers are rarely employed 
except to promote a personal advantage, whose 
gain is principally achieved by taking advantage 
of other men’s necessities. These so living are 
called the idle rich, and I insist that their sons, 
haunting the side doors of metropolitan theatres, 
and their daughters lavishing maudlin affection 
on poodles girt with diamonds, are a more useless 
class—partly by reason of the want of noble 
parental ideals—than the idle loafers on the 
street-corners who will do anything but work. 
So much for the distinction between the various 
classes of the idle rich and the idle poor. 

But now we come to the very perplexing prob¬ 
lem, how to remedy this state of things. Into 
that labyrinth I cannot enter. But let us lay down 
a few general principles, whose truth or falsity 
must be determined by thoughtful minds. 

And, first, scientific charity may demand too 
much of the idle deserving poor, just as indis¬ 
criminate charity may exact too little. Take a 
concrete example. Shall we always refuse to 
help a man because he is, at the moment, the 

n9 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


worse for liquor ? That depends. If he has been 
assisted before, and is of incorrigible, sottish ten¬ 
dencies, possibly the pinch of hunger may be 
sharply corrective. If, on the other hand, he is 
reckless from despair, albeit a steady workman 
when times are good, and has taken a glass to 
drown the memory of the cold hearthstone where 
wife and children are crouching, poverty is 
clearly the source of his fault. Temporary aid 
may stiffen his power of resistance to temptation 
without impairing his self-respect. But indis¬ 
criminate charity often errs more lamentably by 
such unwise giving as fosters a willingly de¬ 
pendent class, whose every member is so much 
additional drain on the resources of the common¬ 
wealth. A scientific charity, that combines 
maxims with mercies, and is not so stiffly eco 
nomic that it virtually repeals the Sermon on the 
Mount, is a most desirable institution. 

But, second, all help should lead to self-help. 
As long as there is coal in the mines, ore in the 
hills, wool on the sheep, hides on the cattle, and 
exhaustless productivity in the soil, something is 
wrong when stomachs are empty and backs thinly 
clad. There can be no such thing as over-pro¬ 
duction as long as men and women somewhere 
in the wide world need every conceivable product 
*30 



Idle Rich and the Idle Poor* 


of human industry. The problem is to bring 
needed work to needy artisans. It is not done in 
times of special industrial prostration. Conse¬ 
quently there must be, for a season, much help 
that does not lead to self-help. You cannot 
create fictitious demand for labor without ulti¬ 
mately robbing somebody. This process only foists 
upon the workingman’s back a heavier tax to 
be paid at some future time. Next to immediate 
self-help is that outside aid which keeps men and 
women from despair until work offers—work that 
meets legitimate demand. 

I remark, again, that the present is a most ex¬ 
cellent opportunity for the idle rich to know the 
idle deserving poor. The deep, instinctive preju¬ 
dices between classes at the social extremes, aris¬ 
ing in ignorance of each other’s true environ¬ 
ment, are never cleared away by legislation that 
draws from the wealth of privilege enjoyed by 
the favored to bestows upon the less favored. 
Never! They are diminished by the loving touch' 
of personal sympathy; and if you wish to bring 
a hard, cold, selfish man of affairs into the mood 
of unwonted tenderness, induce him to visit the 
homes of the poor. And, my word for it, he will 
lie down at night with more of Christ’s Chris- 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


tianity in his heart than he has experienced for 
many a year. 

But, the whole secret of the correction of the 
present maladjustment of economic and industrial 
forces is an open secret. It is steadily to be 
maintained by Christian teachers—and to-day 
more firmly than ever—that there is no social or 
industrial ill whose initial remedy is not found 
in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The difficulty is 
that all men who profess it do not live it. If 
they did, the tap-root of social ills, human sel¬ 
fishness, would be destroyed, and brotherhood 
would become a reality, not a name. I do not 
say that certain theories of reform do not con¬ 
tain a germ of regenerating truth. They do. 
Nationalism, State Socialism, other “isms,” 
are by no means hopelessly illogical and 
visionary. I do not say that legislation may not 
step in to right industrial wrongs, or protect capi¬ 
tal against the assaults of quasi-Anarchists mas¬ 
querading as labor’s champion. But it is becom¬ 
ing clearer every day that the inchoate schemes 
broached as remedial measures are valueless com¬ 
pared with the light and truth of the Christly 
teaching. If that light could shed abroad its 
radiance in every human soul, and that truth glow 


132 



Idle Rich and the Idle Poor. 


in every heart, the words of the poet would justly 
describe the universal state of human society: 

“Peace her olive wand extends. 

1 'And bids wild war his ravage end; 

Man with brother man to meet, 

'And as a brother kindly greet.” 


133 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


CHAPTER XIII. 

PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY. 

In following the currents of ecclesiastical his¬ 
tory up to their fountain-head beneath the Rock 
on which Jesus Christ established His church— 
namely, the faith of Peter—two fundamental 
conceptions of the supreme office and privilege of 
the Christian Church have obtained recognition. 
The first of these I shall describe as the Quaran¬ 
tine theory, which may be reduced to the phrase 
with which Channing begins one of his most im¬ 
pressive discourses. “A system of exclusion and 
denunciation in religion.” On this view the 
church is like a castle, surrounded by moat, draw¬ 
bridge, portcullis, with a sentry-box at every 
point of observation, and a roll of precedents so 
long that not even a prophet like Ezekiel could 
for a second time perform the gastronomical feat 
of swallowing it whole, and still live! And yet 
the expectation is that preacher, deacons, elders, 
presbyters, and bishops, with the godly assem- 
134 



Practical Christianity. 

blage of the multitude and the non-elect to office 
generally, shall pipe to the music of the shib¬ 
boleth cry which says, “The church is for those 
every whit sound of doctrine, and its work is to 
preserve, primarily, soundness of faith.” This 
means, as a rule, what Tennyson means when he 
writes, “What’s up is faith, what’s down is, 
heresy.” And the records of ecclesiastical his¬ 
tory are, for the most part, but the memorials of 
the ins and outs who have sought to pull down or 
prop up the work of their predecessors. The 
conception of church life and work of which I am 
now speaking severely limits the message of the 
preacher to the proclamation of the facts that 
Christ lived and died for sinners—a state¬ 
ment of belief to which I subscribe; but, 
as a statement of the height, breadth, length, 
and depth of the preacher’s pulpit utter¬ 
ance, this utterance is inadequate. This view 
also declares that all living, burning, vital ques¬ 
tions of the present, affecting the morals of the 
community as related to problems of poverty, 
crime, philanthropy, trade, commerce, legislation, 
movements of sanitary, social, and political re¬ 
form, are to be kept out of the church, and ig¬ 
nored by the pulpit, because, forsooth, they are 
not supposed to be a part of the simple Gospel of 
*35 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


salvation in Jesus Christ! Yes, and if such nar¬ 
row, misguided, erring estimate of the relation of 
Christianity to life had prevailed, without check 
or hindrance, through the prolific years of our 
modern civilization, so richly freighted with dis¬ 
coveries that heavenward lift the weary feet of 
humanity, then the shackles of his degradation 
would still cling to the weary limbs of the slave; 
the plague-spots of American cities would widen 
the circle of vice and corruption; the charities that 
rebuke and shame the avarice of the few would 
disappear from sight as suddenly as the ring of 
gold at the touch of the magician’s wand; while 
the drunkard and the profligate, won by the open 
door and warmed and fed by the pity that spoke 
not of Christ until heart and voice betrayed his 
love, would still wear the blistering and torment¬ 
ing chains of passions now dissolved in tears of 
penitence and prayer! This conclusion further 
insists that the poor and neglected may go to 
church if they will, and, if they don’t, are incor¬ 
rigible sinners; and hence little effort is made to 
reach the classes of whose needs, struggles, trials, 
deprivations, well-to-do parishes frequently know 
as much as they do of the inside history of the 
court of Ptolemy Philadelphus. It also argues 
that unless the length of a creed is so great that 
\Z 6 



Practical Christianity- 


breadth is absolutely out of the question, some 
poor fellow who stutters his doctrine and makes 
sweet melody for the weary and heavy-laden upon 
the harp of his loving-kindness may creep in sur¬ 
reptitiously, and stand all unsuspected in the con¬ 
gregation of the orthodox. If he did, some 
voices might make more discordant music than 
his own! 

Now, I hold that the Church of the living 
God is not built upon the sinking sand of an ex¬ 
clusive, inharmonious, unwholesome, worn-out, 
Gospel riddled theory of exclusiveness. There is 
not a verse in Scripture, not a company of dis¬ 
ciples in the first century, not a torch of reason 
under a bushel or on a hill top, not a successful 
experiment or triumphant failure, to vindicate it. 
True, the work of a church must vary according 
to the needs of the century into which its life is 
projected. But the broad and generous view of 
church life and work, which I may call the 
Humanitarian theory, for want of a better term, 
covers the pressing needs of men and women in 
every century, whatever their form or character. 
Over against the conception stated, which limits 
the work and narrows the entrance to its perform¬ 
ance, I will venture to set, like a glorious flag of 
rustling silk and voluminous folds proudly wav- 
M 7 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


mg above a narrow, weather-beaten, diminutive 
streamer, the banner of the new crusade, upon 
which is emblazoned a cross, not merely as a 
symbol of theological belief, but as the symbol 
of a church whose doors swing open to men and 
women of loving, reverent faith, and whose ave¬ 
nues of usefulness lead in all directions whither- 
ever light and truth must go to raise, strengthen, 
comfort, heal, and bless the sons and daughters 
of God. Whatever a full, free, sweet, catholic 
interpretation of the Gospel of Christ may prompt 
the members of a Christian church to accom¬ 
plish, through all the agencies of Christianity, 
literary, scientific, philanthropic, social, and 
moral, that thing I hold to be one of the many- 
sided and exhaustless appeals of a living church 
to a living age. Nay, more, all forms of labor 
which benefit humanity, and which the church 
can do, are better done under the seal and cove-- 
nant of its high and holy authority than in any 
other way. Therefore, the mission of the church 
is as broad as human need; as lofty as the 
sublimest aspiration; as consecrated as the de- 
voutest thought; as large in scope as the farthest 
conceivable sweep of its forces; and varied in 
just that degree in which it is able to give rest, 
hope, peace, and shelter to every tear-stained 
138 



Practical Christianity. 


pilgrim and way-worn traveler. And it is as 
wrong for an assembly of divines, called by 
courtesy an Ecclesiastical Council, to interfere 
with a ministry successfully meeting the exigen¬ 
cies proposed, as it is cruel for a horde of in¬ 
quisitive hawks to attempt to rob a carrier-pigeon 
of the precious message to the starving garrison, 
which flutters beneath the swift and tireless wing. 

But, at this juncture, somebody petulantly ex¬ 
claims, “Not so fast there! The duty of the 
church is to save men from hell by preaching to 
them Christ, and the principal thing to be kept in 
view is the admission of such to its member¬ 
ship.” But allow me to suggest that several 
things must be considered before the church, 
through its ministers or lay workers, can success¬ 
fully do this. Of the people habitually in attend¬ 
ance upon public worship there are three classes: 
(i) The active, useful, consistent members of the 
church, always ready to say, “Here, Lord, am I,” 
when any duty is required of them. (2) The 
cold, indifferent, unawakened, nominal Christians, 
whose names are kept on the roll of the church 
because there is no good reason why they should 
be dropped. Their whole duty seems to lie in 
steady attendance on Sabbath Day services; but 
as for knowledge of righteousness and peace and 
\ 39 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


joy in the Holy Ghost, and consciousness of 
growth in love of God and men—why, such emo¬ 
tions would surprise them as utterly as the 
descent of a summer shower from the blue and 
cloudless sky! And then, (3) there is a class 
of the so-called unconverted—people whose 
ears do not tingle at the strongest preaching, be¬ 
cause such persons are already shot-proof 
through long service as animated targets for pul¬ 
pit fulminations, and the only hope of their con¬ 
version must be looked for in the ultimate re¬ 
turn of that form of noble reason which prompts 
a man to see, in a moment of startling, soul- 
searching power, that disloyalty to Christ, and 
unwillingness to confess Him impair the integrity 
of a life. Outside these classes there are scat¬ 
tered individuals, unknown factors in a congrega¬ 
tion, whose relations to the church cannot be 
formulated. What they will become no man 
can say. 

Now, I submit that the increase of effective¬ 
ness on the part of the church, whose visible re¬ 
sult is the enlargement of the people in spiritual 
sweetness, depth, power, and devotion, can only 
come in one of two ways: (1) By bringing the 

unchurched multitude within its portals. (2) 
By inciting the regular worshipers to go out into 
HO 



Practical Christianity ♦ 

the wide world of human longing and privation 
to carry the helpfulness and sympathy of a liv¬ 
ing, nineteenth century Gospel. In this way— 
and in this way alone—will they kindle afresh the 
flame of devotion whose heat will thaw the icy 
barriers that so often divide the church from her 
needy children. In other words, the preacher 
will be able successfully to proclaim the Gospel of 
salvation when men and women hear it as a new 
and marvelous story, or hear it with quickened 
zeal and fervor. Therefore I say that to rescue 
men from the hell within their own bosom, which 
is a thousand times more real than a place of tor¬ 
ment located everywhere and nowhere by theol¬ 
ogy at sixes and sevens with itself—to do this, 
one must avail himself of all resources which can 
be utilized through a hundred possible channels 
of Christian effort. Hence, the work of the 
church is to follow men with succor in whatever 
manner they can be assisted to light and truth and 
knowledge. Suppose I take a line and rod, with 
bait enough to catch a hundred trout upon a 
string, and throw the sinker into a pool beneath 
the willows, where no man ever yet suspected a 
fish to hide, and where none but fish able to crawl 
on land could possibly congregate. And there I 
sit in solemn state and watch a cork bobbing up 
U\ 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


and down the livelong day, and quiver all over 
with anticipation, while behind the bushes the 
farmer’s boy is grinning and wondering whether 
I am lunatic or clergyman—or both. But a good 
many of our churches are throwing out their 
lines in places where to catch anything would so 
surprise both minister and deacons that they 
would tumble over each other with excitement in 
their haste to haul the prey, and finally lose 
through excessive agitation! All because a nar¬ 
row constructionist attaches but one meaning to 
this word salvation! I don’t like the expression; 
in fact, I am reluctant to take it upon my lips on 
account of its awkwardness, but the whole truth 
is not set forth unless it be said that, to be saved, 
men must be brought into a solvable condition. 
That is, they must be led up to the point where 
the personal appeal of religion will at least re¬ 
ceive attentive hearing. You may preach, lec¬ 
ture, persuade, entreat, warn, threaten, until your 
voice is as hoarse as that of the croaking raven, 
but unless you touch men by an act of personal, 
disinterested kindness that relieves poverty, 
crime, bitterness, pride, wrong-doing, of some 
part of its sting, salvation will be a name of hol¬ 
low mockery! I have read that William Wirt, 
one of the most remarkable men of his day, was a 
*42 



Practical Christianity, 


confirmed drunkard for many years, and, when 
all other means of rescue had availed nothing, 
he was reclaimed by finding upon his blistered 
and swollen face, as he lay in a drunken stupor 
upon what is now one of the principal avenues in 
the city of Washington, a handkerchief bearing 
the initials of the young woman to whom he had 
once been engaged, but from whose affection he 
had separated himself by drink. In passing, she 
had tenderly covered the still handsome though 
dissipated features to hide their shame from the 
vulgar sight of the multitude. Multiply this act 
into a thousand forms of kindly beneficence, 
prompted by the Christly spirit, and you have 
made Christianity something different from the 
current Christianity which Channing said he 
hoped would not last forever! 

If, for example, we take into account certain 
industrial conditions of modern life, under which 
so many young men and women are struggling 
to preserve both faith and character against in- 
numerable temptations, we shall have a concrete 
illustration of the large and unrestricted view of 
church life and work to which attention has 
been directed. Probably most of us are ac¬ 
quainted with the facts relating to the controversy 
in Mr. Moody’s old church in Chicagd, some 
143 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


years ago, arising out of a sermon delivered by 
the pastor, and called forth by the following cir¬ 
cumstances. The working girls of Chicago pub¬ 
lished a letter, in which they described very sim¬ 
ply and earnestly the temptations to which they 
are subjected, and suggested an organization for 
the working classes which should at once be re¬ 
ligious and social, the prime object being to fur¬ 
nish them legitimate society, and so guard against 
the dangers which come from isolation. The 
pastor preached a plain discourse upon this text, 
and proposed that a vacant lot in the rear of the 
church be used for the erection of a large and 
commodious building, so arranged that a pleasant 
and delightful home could thus be found by 
young working people of both sexes, with such 
safeguards established as would make it a most 
helpful resort. Some members of the church, in¬ 
cluding six members of the committee, objected 
to the discourse on the ground that none but 
strictly Gospel sermons should be uttered from 
the pulpit. By Gospel they meant salvation 
through Christ, with the terrors of the law ap¬ 
pended. Well, the minister resigned, Mr. Moody 
came on, spoke to his congregation with common 
sense almost divine, appealed to the Gospel of 
Luke as that of the poor, said there was not a woe 
144 



Practical Christianity, 


pronounced in the whole book, and concluded by 
saying, bluntly, “Don’t get a harp of just one 
string, and harp, harp, harp, all the time on that.” 
The result is known. The church refused to 
accept their minister’s resignation by an enor¬ 
mous majority, the six members of the committee 
went out, on vacation, and all was peace. 

I mention this case because it presents very 
sharply the contrast between the narrow and the 
broad conception of the mission of the Christian 
Church of to-day. In the face of strenuous op¬ 
position in some quarters, the churches of our 
country are beginning to see that social, sanitary, 
industrial, and even political questions—in a 
philosophical, not a partisan, sense—must inter¬ 
est both pulpit and pew, or the masses will still 
further drift from our doors. The resistance to 
this movement is not always solicitude for a lim¬ 
ited Gospel, but is sometimes encouraged by the 
fear that certain business and social sins will be 
rebuked. John Ruskin tells us that the rich re¬ 
fuse wisdom and salvation to the poor, and 
proved the sincerity of his speech by putting his 
large inherited fortune to service for the benefit 
of the workingmen of Great Britain. And, 
Count Tolstoi, the Russian, abandoned his rich 
and luxurious surroundings to go and live among 
145 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


the common people. I would be understood as 
saying most emphatically that such a course is 
not demanded of every man enjoying wealth. 
And he would superficially teach who might in¬ 
sist that this conception of duty binds all good 
men to like renunciation. Wealth, divorced from 
stinginess, can be used for the world’s benefit 
without giving up the bulk of it to others, and, 
even though this were done, division would not 
remedy, but rather increase, many of the exist¬ 
ing evils. But, fearful that certain sacrifices may 
be demanded of the rich, the bold and unflinch¬ 
ing declaration of a business and social gospel is 
not infrequently opposed. I have been informed 
—I know not how correctly—that a brilliant and 
gifted clergyman found it advisable to surrender 
a metropolitan pulpit because he denounced the 
condition of wretched tenement-houses owned by 
men of wealth in his congregation. Happy de¬ 
liverance ! 

Now, the true idea of the office of the Chris¬ 
tian Church will carry the oil and wine of its 
comfort into every place where the light of 
heaven discloses the wan and sunken features of 
misery and pain. If God is our Father and 
Mother, as Theodore Parker loved to think of 
Him and pray to Him, and the church is the holy 
*46 



Practical Christianity, 


fellowship of His children, there is no valid rea¬ 
son under the sun why such an organization 
should not extend its influence and power to the 
remotest quarter of town and city where our fel¬ 
low-creatures endure the burdens which fall upon 
the nether-world. Spurgeon once said, with 
good-natured yet cutting satire, “The trouble 
with ministers is that they will parsonificate the 
Gospel.” Yet the church is doing a worse thing 
when it simmers the Gospel down to a mild de¬ 
coction of theology and pious talk, and requires 
all men to drink out of the same cup on penalty 
of going thirsty and faint. And there is no way 
of forcing the church to the performance of its 
proper duty unless men obey the injunction writ¬ 
ten on the title page of a famous novel—“Put 
yourself in his place.” Here comes in the ap¬ 
plication of the Golden Rule referred to in the 
opening of this essay—“What we would have 
the church do for ourselves, that ought the church 
to do for others.” Well, what may this be? 

If I am cold and hungry, without work or shel¬ 
ter, and shiver beneath a ragged coat, and send 
my frost-bitten feet on exploring expeditions be¬ 
tween gaping holes in well-worn shoes, I am not 
anxious to have the minister to hold me on the 
street corner while he expounds the mystery of 
H7 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


pain, and invite me to the sanctuary next Sunday, 
when he very well knows that the usher will po¬ 
litely but firmly hustle me out as soon as I enter 
the door. No, I want him to encourage me to 
breast the storm of adversity like a man; to hope 
on and hope ever; and I desire, not charity from 
his church—God forbid!—but home and shel¬ 
ter there, and Christian sympathy, until I am able 
to get on my feet, and down misfortune in the 
arena of honorable warfare. And what is true 
of physical need is likewise true of business re¬ 
verses, wasting cares, terrible temptations, for¬ 
lorn environment, bitter trials, and crosses of 
every name and character. Where ought a man 
more naturally to go for strength and support 
than to the bosom of the church, which should be 
to him as a pillow of rest, sustained by the loving 
and kindly arms of Christian brethren? But, if 
the rest which follows weariness of soul be pro¬ 
longed into idleness, let the same brethren, if they 
have not become lazy themselves, disturb the 
siesta by cutting out labor for the new re¬ 
cruit to perform. Look about, and we shall 
quickly learn that the church which comes near¬ 
est to this conception is doing the sturdiest work 
for Christ. And I would develop this view to 
the extent that when an honorable business ma,n, 
>43 



Practical Christianity< 


of devout and useful life, becomes financially em¬ 
barrassed through causes beyond his control, it 
is not only the privilege but the duty of members 
of the same communion, blessed with abundant 
means, to give him monetary aid and encourage¬ 
ment. A visionary proposition, you say? Very 
likely. But unless the church has more visions, 
and fewer periods of sound and dreamless slum¬ 
ber, her brain and heart will become sluggish, 
lethargic, dull. We only know phantoms as such 
because realities exist. Even if Swedenborg, 
with erratic notions, come in at the door with 
leisurely laymen, they will not be so likely to 
play the part of Rip Van Winkle in the pews. 

Perhaps at this point it will be urged that the 
preaching and church work of fifty years ago fol¬ 
lowed out the narrower lines indicated with profit 
to the community and success to the organization. 
But whoever makes the claim overlooks the 
changed conditions of our modern life, which are 
totally at variance with those established in the 
days when our fathers played on the village 
green. Then everybody went to church, and the 
young men and maidens filled the long galleries 
on either side of the capacious meeting-house, and 
chanted “Mere” and “Wells” to their hearts’ con¬ 
tent, while serious and reverent thoughts pos- 

H9 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


sessed their minds, and the man who did not go 
to church was looked upon as a kind of moral 
leper, reserved for the wrath of God. The popu¬ 
lation of the country was largely American and 
few centers of life were overcrowded; conse¬ 
quently there was little occasion for humanitarian 
or missionary endeavor, and the tide of 
immigration, now a mighty inrolling wave, had 
just begun to ripple here and there upon our 
shores. Business cares were lighter, wealth more 
evenly distributed, employment steadier, and the 
tenement house problem almost an unknown 
factor in the task of social regeneration. The 
drift of things was not away from, but tozvard, 
church life; and theology had such strong grip 
upon the intellects of the people that the meta¬ 
physics of faith and the subtleties of Calvinistic 
logic had a sort of fascination for the average 
mind. To be sure, the children crawled under 
the bed in fear of the preacher’s catechism, and 
the sound of his boot-heels on the doorway 
struck terror to their hearts; but nevertheless, 
they could rattle off on their finger’s ends enough 
theology to make a respectable system of divinity 
for the average worshiper of to-day. The Gos¬ 
pel revolved upon the axis of wrath, and while 
love hid in the background of the received faith, 
*50 



Practical Christianity< 


its glorious sunshine, as we now enjoy it, was 
hardly permitted to take the chill from the at¬ 
mosphere of religion. Most people were com¬ 
fortably, or at least decently, situated; there were 
fewer instances of poverty, wretchedness, depri¬ 
vation, misery, than now, and the masses, as we 
understand the word, had no existence. The 
phases of social righteousness and philanthropic 
effort, as I have presented them, did not appeal 
to the church of fifty years ago. Therefore, since 
everybody attended church, and theological issues 
were uppermost in the minds of the people, what 
was left for the dominie but to ring the changes 
on Saybrook and Westminster, to the infinite edi¬ 
fication of his hearers? The quarantine theory 
ran its course serenely because there was no ap¬ 
parent need of any other. Now all is altered, and 
the reasoning of its advocates is wholly invali¬ 
dated by the evolution of the stern facts of our 
modern civilization. 

There is just now universal solicitude through¬ 
out all denominations of Christian believers be¬ 
cause there are so few additions to the member¬ 
ship of the churches. But can we wonder at 
this, when our conception of Christian work is so 
narrow and inadequate, and our participation in 
the same so feeble and inefficient? Going to 
*51 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


church on Sunday, hearing music as an aesthetic 
pleasure, preaching as an intellectual diversion, 
and going home to forget it all after a satisfactory 
dinner—some of us have been doing this, and lit¬ 
tle more, for ten years, and how in the world can 
we hope to be at peace on such a record? We 
have not, perhaps, made one soul happier, one 
heart lighter, among all the hosts of the weary 
and heavy-laden. It has been money, money, 
money, or pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, continu¬ 
ally. You cannot save men unless you touch 
their hearts. You cannot lift them without lift¬ 
ing your own lives above the level at which they 
halt. You cannot inspire the multitude with re¬ 
spect for Christianity until they perceive that you 
respect it sufficiently to make sacrifices for it. 
Never before, in the teeming life of the centuries, 
did such opportunity wait on the Christian 
Church. Never before was there such need of 
her services and prayers. May she everywhere 
become, like a temple beautiful, lifting the pol¬ 
ished dome of her faith and works into the am¬ 
bient air of religion, constantly purified and 
sweetened by winds that blow from the country 
of the waving palms and the crystal rivers; may 
the church open wide her doors to the vast mul¬ 
titude that daily groan beneath the yoke of un- 
*52 



Practical Christianity. 


t 


relenting poverty; may her walls resound with 
songs of praise from the grateful lips of men and 
women gathered into her fold by the loving im¬ 
portunity of faithful servants of the Cross; and 
may her cloisters be enlarged and extended in 
every direction so that all men needing comfort, 
assistance, refuge, and the inspiration of sym¬ 
pathy may discover unstinted welcome and hospi¬ 
tality within the holy precincts of her all-em¬ 
bracing love. 


*53 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


CHAPTER XIV. 

THE RELATION OF MUSIC TO WORSHIP. 

It is very evident that the ancient Temple 
worship did not lack in music. Besides the 
cymbals, psalteries, and harps, there were com¬ 
panies of singers to lift sweet voices in the praise 
of God and in the chanting of the great and seri¬ 
ous realities of Israel’s religion, which found ex¬ 
pression in melodies of surpassing power. The 
modern age does not know all there is to be 
known about music. I suspect the ancients 
would sneer, and with good reason, at many of 
our modern performances, and certainly they 
might have good reason for hissing! There is 
a closer relation between intellectuality and musi¬ 
cal taste and expression than most people suppose, 
and the literature which comes down to us from 
ancient times is of such potent power in the 
domain of thought that it would be strange in¬ 
deed if music did not reach an equally lofty 
standard. A man does not need to study Her- 
*54 



Music and Worship, 

der’s wonderful book on “The Spirit of Hebrew 
Poetry” to realize that the noble stature of 
David’s muse marries thought to such melodious 
forms of expression as necessitate a correspond¬ 
ing felicity of sounds. Full choir, all trained, and 
every one skilful. No unsteadiness of parts in 
the headlong rush to finish first; no light operatic 
airs to insult the words sublime; no thunders or 
crashes of voices and instruments where a whis¬ 
per of song is required; no prolonged screaming 
of sopranos and bellowing of bassos in the mali¬ 
cious effort to beat out the life of some tenderly 
reminiscent strain or word; no sprinting matches 
between contraltos and tenors, to see which shall 
climb the highest or sink the lowest; no repetition 
of beautiful devotional hymns with as little feel¬ 
ing in the hearts of the singers as though they 
were humming the latest catch-word of a popular 
ditty. None of these performances in the Jew¬ 
ish Temple. All is devout, exalted, appropriate, 
devotional, impressive, and soul-subduing, be¬ 
cause the musicians themselves are close to the 
heart of the great Jehovah; the worshiping con¬ 
gregation hears his voice with awe, “as the sound 
of many waters,” and the priests of the Temple 
lift their reverent thoughts to the great “I Am,” 
with every cloud of incense that floats above the 
*55 




What is the Matter with the Church? 


altar. Here, then, is worship, the grandest that 
ever sought the form of ritual, and here is the 
God-inspired power of music to melt the stony 
heart of religious indifference to the measures of 
God’s redeeming love. All other aspects of music 
in religious service, that merely show off voices, 
and entertain the jaded senses of the crowd, with¬ 
out a devotional spirit and moral purpose behind 
them, may be theatrical and imposing, and to a 
certain extent moving, but they do not rise higher 
than the altitude of a passing mood. Musical 
effect is one thing—musical sincerity another. 
Singers have pleased me with their proficiency; 
but I knew all the time that they had no more 
heart in what they sang than has a variety per¬ 
former on the stage. Words may be eloquent; 
they are useless when they do not touch the soul. 
Church music may be charming; it is but an idle 
breath when no message of spiritual power goes 
from the singer to him who listens. The Puri¬ 
tans and Spartans were both agreed that luxury 
of sound was sometimes mischievous. The 
Puritan said—I quote his words—“Sweet music 
at first delighteth the ears, but afterward corrupt¬ 
ed and depraveth the mind.” Timotheus, the 
Milesian, added a twelfth string to his harp, for 
which he was severely punished by the Spartans. 
*56 



Music and Worship, 


They feared this luxury of sound would effem¬ 
inate the people. What would they think in our 
modern church, where music too often degenerates 
into show, and people pay for the luxury precisely 
as they buy a ticket to see Irving in the “Bells,” 
only the sum is paid in lump for fifty-two 
dress rehearsals a year—mostly in palace-car 
churches, however, where religion is tolerated as 
not a bad thing to have, if it does not interfere 
with a good deal of sinning on week-days. We 
see, therefore, that music is not only closely re¬ 
lated to mind, but to morals as well; and, church 
wise, this moral quality makes its swift appeal to 
the emotional sense; and the exact relation of 
music to the emotions and the effect of melody 
upon the listener are so truly and eloquently de¬ 
scribed in the language of Dr. Haweis that I wel¬ 
come the opportunity which this occasion brings, 
to quote from the pages of that book which has 
become a household name—“Music and Morals.” 
Says the writer: “Like the sound of bells at 
night breaking the silence, only to lead the spirit 
into deeper peace; like a leaden cloud at morn, 
rising in gray twilight, to hang as a golden mist 
before the furnace of the sun; like the dull, deep 
pain of one who sits in an empty room watch¬ 
ing the shadows of the firelight full of memories; 
157 



What is the Mattel* with the Church? 


like the plaint of souls that are wasted with sigh¬ 
ing; like paeans of exalted praise; like sudden 
songs from the open gates of paradise—is music. 
Like one who stands in the midst of hot and ter¬ 
rible battle, drunk with the fiery smoke and hear¬ 
ing the roar of cannon in a trance; like one who 
finds himself in a long cathedral aisle, and hears 
the pealing organ, and sees a kneeling crowd 
smitten with fringes of colored light; like one 
who, from a precipice, leaps out upon the warm 
midsummer air toward the peaceful valleys be¬ 
low, and, feeling himself buoyed up with wings 
that suddenly fail him, wakens in great despair 
from his wild dream—so is he who can listen and 
understand.” 

If such be the mission of music, which George 
Eliot characterizes as love in search of a word, 
it is very evident that our Congregational, Bap¬ 
tist, Methodist, Unitarian, Universalist, and Pres¬ 
byterian churches are yet indifferent to the musi¬ 
cal advantages that flow from the adoption of a 
ritual of worship in which melodies and re¬ 
sponses, prayers and confessions, under safe¬ 
guards I have already set forth, shall alike call 
forth the helpful participation of minister, choir, 
and people. There can be no sort of question 
that the religious bodies which give the people 
*58 



Music and Worship, 


most to do in the service, and exact from the choir 
music of the most devotional type, are gaining the 
largest numbers of worshipers. In the first par¬ 
ticular the Roman Catholic Church is seriously 
defective; but in the second particular it must be 
conceded that Protestants have absolutely 
nothing “approaching the grandeur of the Roman 
Catholic masses, where we have a mind like that 
of Mozart or Beethoven steadily working out, in 
strains of incomparable depth and pathos, a great 
connected series of thoughts, embodying all the 
varied phases of religious emotion.” What man, 
capable of profoundest feeling, has not been 
thrilled to his heart’s depth by the great cathedral 
music of the Romish Church? And in our own 
Episcopal body, where High Church symbols are 
sparingly but not always judiciously employed, 
what contributes more directly to the heartiness 
of the worship than the voices of the people so 
often exercised, and what touches the soul more 
tenderly with melting thoughts of religious privi¬ 
lege than the solemn strains of both processional 
and recessional chant? Our Presbyterian and 
Congregational churches have been absolutely 
forced into warmer, more varied, and more wor¬ 
shipful forms of service by the hunger of the 
people and by the pressure of competition from 
159 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


without. On this point allow me to quote the 
strong language of Professor Waldo S. Pratt, of 
Hartford Theological Seminary, one of the most 
rigid and orthodox of Congregational institu¬ 
tions. He writes: “American dissenting 
churches have begun to see that in their protest 
against the Episcopacy of the eighteenth century 
they went to the extreme in many matters. They 
have not only fallen into bald and irregular habits 
of worship, but in their exaltation of the teaching 
office of the pulpit they have almost forgotten the 
worshiping office of the pew. Accordingly, 
throughout the land arises a cry for the enrich¬ 
ment of public worship. Hence the growing use 
of responsive reading, of formulae of prayer and 
confession, of singing in which all the people may 
join.” And in order that you may not suppose 
me to exaggerate this demand from the very heart 
of the body, I will add that, in the State of 
Massachusetts, 138 out of 422 Congregational 
churches reporting made use of responsive liturgi¬ 
cal service. But most of us can remember the 
day when such an innovation would have seemed 
scandalous. Of course there has been—there 
now is—strenuous opposition to any departure 
from the customs of our fathers in this and in 
other respects. An acquaintance who recently 
*60 



Music and Worship* 


adopted for his church, by majority vote, a some¬ 
what liturgical form of service, tells me that to 
this day certain of his congregation obstinately 
refuse to open their lips when the responses are 
read. And I beg of the reader not to be fright¬ 
ened by the name liturgical, for it comes from two 
Greek words signifying “belonging to the people” 
and “work” or “act;” and its early application 
simply meant that which was performed by the 
whole people, in congregation assembled. Now, 
upon the large view of the case, it must be ad¬ 
mitted that a man could do worse than keep his 
mouth closed in church (he might sleep, for ex¬ 
ample, or interrupt the minister) ; but the argu¬ 
ment so often used, which appeals to ancient 
usage as a test of fitness, is wide of the mark. 
If our fathers could rise from the dead and be 
with us to-day, yonder organ would be an abom¬ 
ination ; the simple creed, on which many 
churches rest, “a divisive and perversive docu¬ 
ment the heat from our furnaces an effeminate 
folly, and cushions a useless luxury. In general, 
it may be said that, if the fathers of Puritan 
New England should risetoview the modern situ¬ 
ation they would hurriedly retreat to their graves 
in deep chagrin that they knew so little when liv¬ 
ing ! When a man appeals to the customs of his 

m 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


ancestors, in point of doctrine or usage, as final 
authority, it means either one of three things: 
(i) His own blindness to the fact that Christian¬ 
ity is itself a sweeter, nobler, purer force because 
of the successively broadening interpretations of 
its meaning. (2) His strange ignorance of the 
truth which other men perceive, that his own 
prejudices are mistaken for homage of ancestral 
opinion. And (3) his utter insensibility to the 
fact of history which shows that he himself, 
however broad or narrow in theology, or anything 
else, cannot live a week without flatly opposing 
the views favored by the fathers. It is a cause of 
congratulation that no man can live up to his 
creed in this particular, for if men could be con¬ 
sistent we should still believe the world made 
in six little days, and credit the belief of the Rev. 
Cotton Mather and the clergy of his time, that 
witches could enter a room through a key-hole! 

Now, in the present instance the question is, 
not whether the Puritans would have favored 
a liturgical form of religious service, but whether 
such service is best fitted to meet the wants of 
nineteenth century worshipers. It seems to me 
that any* candid study of the situation must 
compel the latter conclusion. How cold and 
barren is the worship of the average New Eng- 
162 



Music and Worship, 


land cHurch! At one end the minister, but¬ 
tressed behind a pulpit which appears to say in 
his behalf, '‘Touch me, O people, if you dare,” 
and usually, at the other end of the building, a 
choir, well stocked with all materials for cor¬ 
respondence during sermon! (Having sung in 
a choir at a time when novels were read behind 
the organ loft, I speak with authority.) And 
between the two is the mass of the people, with 
no more part in the proceedings (save an occa¬ 
sional hymn where one man drives ten nearly 
frantic by singing out of tune) than the weather- 
vane on the steeple! The congregation say, in 
effect, to the minister, “Here we are: now enter¬ 
tain us for an hour, or we will go to sleep.” Of 
course, a man will sleep, or look out of the win¬ 
dow, or fumble the leaves of a hymn-book, or 
whisper to his neighbor, unless you give him 
something to do before the sermon. But in many 
forms of denominational usage it is unhappily the 
case that all other parts of service are looked 
upon merely as preliminaries to the discourse, 
when, in fact, a discourse would gain immeasura¬ 
bly in power if the current of religious feeling 
could be steadily deepened until the time for its 
delivery is at hand. As matters are now, the 
minister sustains all the burden, and the people 
*63 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


little or none of it, unless he preaches poorly, and 
in that case, the burden is relieved by slumber! 

It is very clear, then, that the future of choir 
music, of liturgy and responses, of chant and 
hymnal, is simply immense. “Let the people 
praise thee; let all the people praise thee ,0 Lord,” 
is the utterance of Holy Writ. If the ancient 
Temple worship had been conducted on the plan 
we are criticising, Israelitish history would have 
yielded no such psalmody as may be found in the 
early Scriptures. Barren worship is productive 
of no such blessed inspirations and emotions as 
follow what is truly congregational worship. I 
am ready to grant the existence of certain dan¬ 
gers. One is, as I have said, that the music may 
be simply an entertainment. When Archbishop 
Stephens, of New York, was dying he took the 
hand of a friend, and whispered, almost with his 
last breath, “Come to the funeral. The music 
will be splendid.” It is easy to see how wor¬ 
shipers, nursed by such a passion, might come to 
look on the church as a kind of sanctified theater. 
Another danger is that the service largely ritual¬ 
istic may be emptied of all feeling of true devo¬ 
tion. Dr. Lyman Abbott notes a great absence 
of seriousness in the Church of England services 
at St. Paul’s and in the cathedral services of Ant- 
164 



Music and Worship* 


werp, Cologne, and Paris. Undoubtedly there is 
valid ground for the objection that the aesthetics 
of worship may be considered at the expense of 
pungent admonitions of the conscience. Every 
feature of worship that is merely show, and which 
tends to make men reverent only in appearance, 
and sometimes hardly that, is perfectly useless in 
the cause of undefiled religion. But is there not 
a middle way between meagreness on the one 
hand and overladen sumptuousness upon the 
other, whose adoption would not only enrich the 
forms of worship, but also quicken the spiritual 
pulse of the hearer? I believe there is, and with 
brief and hurried emphasis I have sought merely 
to suggest a few of the many phases of the prob¬ 
lem which now forces itself upon the people of 
all congregations. And upon this phase of the 
subject I will only remark that three principles 
must be duly observed in the construction of a 
satisfactory ritual: (i) The sentiment of rever¬ 

ence must be increased, and not diminished. All 
tendencies toward trivialness in the treatment of 
the great realities symbolized by worship must be 
sternly reproved. (2) There should be entire 
fitness of parts. Music, responses, prayers, must 
not be permitted to overweight each other. Pro¬ 
portion is as necessary in service as it is in archi- 
i65 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


tecture. (3) Concentration of effects. The aim 
of all worship should be to bring God nearer, and 
to lift the soul in adoration. Whatever con¬ 
tributes to these results—though it be an inno ¬ 
vation—ought at least to receive a respectful 
hearing in the court of reason. 

But I cannot bring this chapter to its close 
without touching upon the wide and general in¬ 
fluence of music in soothing the stormy passions 
of mankind, and in the elevation of their thoughts 
through the subtle power of melody that vibrates 
along the diviner chords of our being. It is not 
the Church alone which must bring to the people 
the anthems whose uplifting strain subdues the 
discord of the life to the melody of that inward 
peace whose highest liame is love. From every 
source that is pure, and from every hand and 
voice able to minister to human need by instru¬ 
ment or song, there must flow the magic sounds 
that banish care and conquer weariness. Steele 
quaintly says of the Italians, “There is not a 
laborer or handicraft man that, in the cool of 
evening, does not relieve himself with solos and 
sonatas l” and, Knight, in the “History of Eng¬ 
land,” in referring to the age of Elizabeth, speaks 
of those exquisite compositions, the madrigals of 
the fireside, which made for almost every Eng- 
166 



Music and Worship* 


lish household an open door to melodies that 
cheered the laborer’s heart when the twilight 
bell rang to even-song. But how much of the 
might and power of song, of the sweet unison of 
sounds that flow from instruments well attuned, 
salutes the dull and tired senses of countless 
weary workers among the masses who toil for a 
pittance, and live in tenements because heaven 
affords no other shelter? I heard for almost an 
entire day the great master Remenyi draw his 
wondrous bow upon the obedient strings of his 
violin; I' saw the little company who gathered 
round played upon by his genius as some mighty 
orator brings to the features of his hearers the 
outward sign of secret thought or passion; I 
watched the most noted unbeliever in the world until 
the melody began to qui\ er at the great overflow¬ 
ing heart of Robert Ingersoll, and as the big tears 
fell from the eyes which had so often flashed a 
withering scorn, I felt, as never before, the 
majesty of music as a gift immortal to the race. 
But what do the common people of America know 
of such a privilege? Our churches, with their 
famed and cultured singers, open neither doors 
nor pews; great symphonies, interpreted by 
Damrosch or Thomas or Nikisch, are rarely heard 
by those whose meagre wage forbids the neces- 
*67 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


sary outlay; there are no exquisite evening songs 
and vesper services and melodious numbers, that 
lift the care-worn heart to God, for thousands 
of the decent and worthy poor. Philanthropy 
can do as lofty and noble work in this direction 
as in any other, and it is an omen of good for the 
future that the Sunday afternoon concerts in the 
Central Park of New York, in which the serv¬ 
ices of the very best musicians were rendered, 
proved a delight and benefit to thousands who, 
for the hour, forget that they dwelt in hovels or 
that their children wanted bread. Open the gal¬ 
leries of art to the people; give them the choicest 
music; make them welcome in the famous libra¬ 
ries of the cities, on the one day of the week when 
the weary and heavy-eyed procession of toilers at 
loom and forge, at the sewing-table and in the 
stifling factory dust, halts at the Inn of Sabbath 
Rest. Ay! forget not the mission of those of 
whom Longfellow writes: 

“God sent his singers upon earth, 

With songs of sadness and of mirth, 

That they might touch the hearts of men, 
And bring them back to heaven again/' 


Let all who sing remember how high and holy 

*68 



Music and Worship* 

is their mission. Pure hearts and pure voices 
are sources of redemption to many a blasted and 
ruined life. “Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let 
me hide myself in thee”—how the lines melt to 
the tenderness of the Infinite Love! Wedded to 
appropriate melody and sung by him whose soul 
is filled with a joyous sense of the Divine Pres¬ 
ence in forgiveness, these words become the hal¬ 
lowed prayer of a worshipful people. So with 
hundreds of the grand old hymns of the Church. 
When we put religion into music, either of instru¬ 
ments or of voices, and make the power of melody 
the power of the Holy Spirit in character, music 
rises to the measure of the old Hebrew conception 
of its place in the house of God, and becomes as 
the very breathing of that Harmony whose pres¬ 
ence all space doth inhabit. The power of music 
in Christian worship is yet but a promise. Let 
the tides of religion in choir and congregation the 
deeper flow, and the sham of music, that sings the 
words without a sympathetic soul, will disappear 
forever, only to unveil the unutterable depths of 
a melody whose every tone is the master-tone of 
God. 


S69 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


CHAPTER XV. 

A SYMPOSIUM ! 

[The introductory paper in this volume enti¬ 
tled, “Wanted: A Society for the Decrease of the 
Ministry/’ was originally published in the Even¬ 
ing Post, under an anonymous signature and im¬ 
mediately attracted wide attention. Comments, 
both of approval and disapproval, appeared in 
many secular newspapers and religious weeklies. 
Ultimately, the New York World, in its Sunday 
edition, invited opinions upon the subject- 
matter from a number of well-known clergymen 
and also invited the author to review the debate in 
its columns. Through the courtesy of the World 
I am now permitted to include these contributions 
in order to throw all possible light upon the exist¬ 
ing situation. It is believed they will add inter¬ 
est to the discussion upon the existing status of 
the church and ministry. The author refrains 
from including his further comment upon the 
positions maintained by Dr. Harris, Dr. Everett, 
170 



A Symposium* 


aind others because his own contention is already 
sufficiently clear, and also because he believes the 
essential point—to wit, the overplus of the clergy 
—is, upon the whole, sustained by the contribu¬ 
tors to the World symposium. At all events, he 
is quite willing to let the controversy rest on its 
present basis in the hope that thoughtful men may 
find in these pages helpful suggestion in regard ‘to 
the pressing problem of ministerial demand and 
supply.] 

BY C. C. EVERETT, 

Dean Harvard Divinity School. 

You ask me for a few words in regard to a re¬ 
cent communication signed “A Clergyman,” 
which discussed the oversupply of ministers. 
This communication contains much truth and 
much good advice. In the Unitarian denomina¬ 
tion the oversupply is largely owing to the great 
number of preachers that come to it from other 
religious bodies; and this year it is increased bv 
the fact that, owing to the hard times, some 
churches, especially in the West, have been 
closed. I understand that a similar state of 
things exists in other denominations. 

The counsel that your correspondent gives to 
theological seminaries cannot be too strongly 

m 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


urged. These seminaries, for the most part, 
make no charge for room rent or tuition, and 
almost any young man of tolerable education and 
fair character can find a respectable seminary that 
will give him money enough to cover his general 
expenses. Thus the line of least resistance is the 
path that leads to the ministry. The competition 
comes only after the profession has been entered. 
The church thus gets preachers from whom it 
may select, but the process is a cruel one. 

The church gets ministers in this way, but 
hardly gets the best. It is still as hard as ever, 
it seems harder than ever, to find men to fill the 
most important pulpits. Your correspondent ad ¬ 
mits that the candidate fresh from the seminary 
finds it comparatively easy to attain a settlement. 
This shows that the churches are looking out in 
hope for such men as it needs. I find that in the 
Harvard school men are tempted to leave at the end 
of their first or second year; the opportunities are 
so many. One man who left the Harvard school 
a year ago, a Presbyterian, tells me that he 
preached in seven churches and received a call 
from each. There is no doubt that a young man, 
well educated, with fitness for the work of the 
ministry, would not have to wait long for the op¬ 
portunity that he desired. 

M2 



A Symposium* 


All this shows the responsibility that rests upon 
the seminaries. Your correspondent refers to 
the Harvard school. 

This gives its degree to no one who has not re¬ 
ceived the degree of A. B., except in the case of a 
man from a foreign country, who must show an 
education equal to that which is respresented by 
our A. B. It gives aid to no student who does 
not reach a certain degree of scholarship. 

It has recently raised its yearly fee to $150. It 
is doing what it can to protect the ministerial 
profession, regardless of a probable loss in num¬ 
bers. For the good of our churches, of whatever 
name; for the good of the young men, so many 
of whom are now being lured by easy paths into 
a profession for which they have little aptitude, 
and in which they will find, too often, disap¬ 
pointed hopes and wasted lives; it would wel¬ 
come the co-operation of all other theological 
seminaries in the attempt to discourage such men 
from entering a calling that demands and well re¬ 
wards the best. 

BY DWIGHT L. MOODY. 

The ministry is overcrowded because too many 
men are in it who do not know and cannot effec¬ 
tively use the English Bible. The average lay- 

173 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


man learns with astonishment that very little 
Bible is studied in the three or four years spent 
in a theological seminary. Reasoning in the com¬ 
mon-sense way in which he manages his own 
affairs, he has concluded that, since the business 
of a minister’s life is to teach, preach and live the 
English Bible, therefore, the first object of a 
seminary training should be to make him master 
of it. No wonder he is amazed to learn that in 
most seminaries the English Bible is not a text 
book at all! It is as if a school of engineering 
should not teach the use of the theodolite, or a 
commercial college should omit bookkeeping. 

The ministry is overcrowded with men who do 
not know how to preach. The ability to write 
religious essays of fair literary and ethical merit 
is widespread—but that is not preaching. It is 
pathetic to see these men seeking what they call 
the secret of those preachers who, like the late 
Mr. Spurgeon, draw great audiences year after 
year and lead thousands to Christ. They miss 
the so-called “secret” because it is so simple. If 
these men will throw away their essays, get rid of 
their doubts, get a burning conviction that men 
out of Christ are lost, that the Bible is true and 
that the Gospel saves, and will stand manfully up 
and tell men so, they, too will have audiences. 
*74 



A Symposium, 


But the ministry is not, never was, never will be 
overcrowded with men called into the ministry 
under such constraint of God that woe is unto 
them if they preach not the Gospel; who know, 
believe and preach the people’s Bible in the 
people’s mother tongue; who are not seeking pul¬ 
pits which have been made “desirable” by the 
labors of other men, but are willing to take hold 
in some needy place and create a desirable pulpit 
by prayer, straight, biblical, Holy-Ghost preach¬ 
ing and hard work. 

And it may be added that such men are to-day 
as never before sought on every hand. They are 
the one article of which there is no oversupply, 
nor does God leave one of them without either an 
audience or an adequate support. 

One of your correspondents thinks “the Moody 
school” is partly responsible for the throng of ap¬ 
plicants for the “desirable” pulpits. I venture 
the assertion that no man sent forth with the com¬ 
mendation of the Chicago Bible Institute can be 
found in that throng, and I offer as food for re¬ 
flection the fact that so far from swelling the host 
of unemployed ministers, the Bible Institute is 
wholly unable to meet the demand which the 
churches make for its men. The greatest 


175 



What is the Matte* with the Church? 


difficulty we have is to keep them until they finish 
the course of training and study. 

BY THE LATE REV. JOHN HALL, D.D. 

Regarding an oversupply of ministers much 
may be said that is true, but no more true than of 
other professions; but the difficulty is that the 
minister who is unemployed is easily identified. 
We cannot so easily indicate the lawyer or the 
doctor who has for years little or nothing to do. 

It is true there are many ministers without 
charges, but they are not all useless. Many of 
them aid ministers in charge. Many use their 
pens to advantage, and some are useful teachers. 
It is an infelicity in American life that the “dead¬ 
line” is fixed too early in various fields of labor, 
and as an “old pastor” I dislike the application of 
this view to the ministry. 

More than a quarter of a century ago I doubted 
the wisdom of extending pecuniary aid so freely 
as it is done in some of our seminaries. I would 
not have the seminaries refuse qualified appli¬ 
cants, but it would be prudent to allow young 
men to “make their own way” financially, even 
though it delayed their licensure, except in special 
cases. Many men would be stronger and more 
efficient through life if thus brought to cultivate 
i76 



A Symposium* 


prudence, self-reliance and habits of steady effort. 
Where pecuniary aid is procured on the competi¬ 
tive scholarship plan, there is less ground for 
criticism. 

As to “oversupply,” there are many unem¬ 
ployed toilers on other than ministerial lines. 
Only to-day a respectable man out of employment 
said to me: “There are many applicants for 
such places as I have had, and even where there 
is a vacancy they thought me too old to be em¬ 
ployed.” He seemed in middle life. 

As to the oversupply of churches, the question 
is: Are there too many for the people, or only too 
many for the people who go to church? It is a 
principle with the Board of Church Erection of 
the Presbyterian Church to keep out of competi¬ 
tion where existing churches are supplying the 
wants of the people. It is to be remembered 
that in our land communities change. New 
England rural towns and villages have in some 
places lost the people who once sustained useful 
churches. There are towns in the newer regions 
that have not realized the hopes that drew many 
to them, and of which it would be true to say 
that there are not only too many churches, but 
also too many dry-goods houses, and even too 
many banks. Congregations and churches are 
Ml 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


composed of human beings not infallible, and the 
law of demand and supply affects them as it does 
other organizations and companies. What we 
need in the nation is not a reduction in the num¬ 
ber of ministers, but an increase of spiritual 
power, of fidelity to the Master, of the teaching 
and preaching of the glorious Gospel, and of reli¬ 
ance on the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the 
hearts of people and pastors. 

BY THE REV. LEWIS W. MUDGE, D.D.. 

Princeton, N. J. 

The spirit of unrest so manifest in churches 
and among ministers is seen also in other profes¬ 
sions and in business circles, and is the outcome 
of financial and social conditions. In the East, 
and especially in our larger cities, there is unques¬ 
tionably a considerable number of unemployed 
ministers, and it is equally true that an unusual 
number of the graduates of our seminaries have 
not secured fields of labor. It would be unsafe, 
however, to draw the conclusion that the ministry 
is overcrowded. 

There are other and more satisfactory ways of 
explaining these abnormal conditions. Ministers 
finding themselves without charges are apt to 
gravitate to the centers of population, and in this 

m 



A Symposium* 


they are not peculiar. As a result the large cities 
have a surplus, while other portions of the coun¬ 
try, especially the West, are in need. 

The heavy debts resting upon the mission 
boards largely account for existing conditions 
In former years it was not unusual for half a 
dozen synodical missionaries to appear in Prince¬ 
ton in February offering attractive fields in the 
West for more men than were available. Now 
not only is no advance made in the opening of 
new territory, but every effort is making to relieve 
the mission boards of their burdens by uniting 
churches under one pastorate and declining ap¬ 
plications for appointments. 

Let prosperous times return and the liberality 
of the churches respond as in former years to the 
calls of the Church and there would be numerous 
fields open. Even in existing conditions churches 
are not wanting to those who are willing and able 
to endure hardness. 

BY THE REV. GEORGE HODGES, 

Of the Episcopal Theological School, Cam¬ 
bridge, Mass. 

It is true that every desirable vacant parish is 
pursued by an eager crowd of parsons, some of 

*79 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


them being out of employment, others being dis¬ 
contented with their cures. It is true also that 
after middle life many ministers find the door of 
opportunity shut in their faces. 

It is a mistake, however, to think that this situa¬ 
tion is peculiar to the ministry. The discomforts 
of it are made more public in the case of the clergy¬ 
man than in the case of the physician or the law¬ 
yer, because the clergyman must obtain in a for¬ 
mal way, by a vote of a meeting, the suffrages of 
a considerable company of people. Everybody in 
the neighborhood knows about it. But the idea 
that competition is an evil which touches the 
clergy only or chiefly is contradicted by daily 
experience. Competition is the condition under 
which modern life goes on. Few men suffer 
from it so little as the parson. 

If a young man is to be warned against enter¬ 
ing the ministry because he will thus expose him¬ 
self to competition, he needs a warning much 
more emphatic against becoming a doctor or a 
politician or a journalist or a man of business. 
And as for the case of the middle-aged clergyman 
who leaves his place before he has another and 
is consequently left without employment, it is 
paralleled in every profession. Let a middle- 
aged physician forsake his practice at a time when 



A Symposium- 


he is unsuccessful or discouraged and move to 
another town where he is not known, will patients 
fill his office. No doubt there are instances of 
hardship, sometimes injustice, in the ministry as 
elsewhere, but the truth is that commonly when 
a man is no longer wanted by a parish it is not 
because he is old, but because he is inefficient. 
Indeed, the wonder is not so much that the peo¬ 
ple are sometimes ungrateful as that they are for 
the most part so patient. There are men in the 
ministry who keep their places because they are 
in a measure sheltered from the rude winds of 
competition which blow without. If they were 
in a business they would be discharged to¬ 
morrow. 

It is true that ministerial salaries are small. 
Sometimes they are grievously small. That is 
the inevitable consequences of the present absurd 
and vicious sectarianism which weakens and dis¬ 
credits what a correspondent calls the “Prot¬ 
estant body.” Any young man who is after 
large wages will best go elsewhere. 

I know nothing of the situation in other 
churches, but it is plain to me so far as the 
Episcopal Church is concerned, that there never 
was a time when a true man of the right sort 
able to think, able to speak, devoted tp the ad~ 

m 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


vancement of the kingdom of God, had a better 
chance to make the best use of all that is in him 
for the good of the community. The emphasis is 
changing from theology to philanthropy. The 
supreme interest is in the application of the teach¬ 
ings of Christ to the present problems of society. 
The minister is taking again his old place as the 
leader of his neighbors. He is standing between 
the rich and the poor, between the master and the 
man, helping each to understand the other. 

For ignorant men, bigoted, narrow-minded, in 
sympathy with a past age and out of sympathy 
with the present, of scanty education and narrow 
abilities and no gifts of leadership, there is, indeed, 
no place in the ministry. And the more 
hindrances which the theological schools can put 
in the way of such men the better. 

As a trade—as a way of making money—the 
ministry is a poor business; but as a profession 
—as an opportunity of the highest usefulness to 
the community—it is a life of joy and satisfac¬ 
tion. 


BY DR. JAMES O. MURRAY, 

Dean of Princeton University. 

“What the Church wants is a higher intellec¬ 
tual standard. There are too many men in the 

m 



A Symposium* 


ministry that could not prosper at anything 
else and do not succeed here.” Dr. Murray is 
doubtful whether, after all, the ministry is as 
overcrowded as law or medicine. The dean’s 
idea, although he did not say it in these words, 
seemed to be that there was no small amount of 
laziness and lack of self-denial among those who 
are ordained to preach the Scriptures. Salary 
was not what the preacher was supposed to work 
for. Men who do are those who crowd the min¬ 
istry, men who are not willing to go anywhere 
that God calls them, and go not for the salary. 

The last point on which the dean was asked to 
give his opinion was the multiplicity of denom¬ 
inations. He said: “There is no doubt that 
there are too many denominations, and hence, 
often, too many churches in one community. 
There are many towns in the East, only large 
enough to support one, that have three or more 
churches, where one would furnish ample means 
of grace.” 

BY PROF. B. N. BACON, 

Yale Theological Seminary. 

I do not believe that the ministry is over¬ 
crowded, but I do believe that there are a good 
many men in the ministry to-day who would 
*83 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


make a better success in some other calling. 
Good ministers usually have a charge and bad 
ones don’t deserve one. 

BY THE REV. GEORGE HARRIS, D.D., 
President Amherst College. 

It is undoubtedly true that the ranks of the 
ministry are at present overcrowded. The num¬ 
ber of unemployed clergymen is increased some¬ 
what by reason of the protracted depression of 
business. Some of the small churches are not 
able to pay a living salary, and the missionary 
societies are obliged to reduce their working 
forces. 

These conditions, it is to be hoped, are tempo¬ 
rary. The numerous applications for vacant pul¬ 
pits are not conclusive as to the number of unem ¬ 
ployed, for the same men have their names sent 
to many committees. Still there is a consider¬ 
able excess which has been increasing the last 
few years. The decrease of the ministry is 
therefore as much desired now as the increase 
was formerly desired. 

All will agree that there are not too many 
superior clergymen. If the ill-qualified men were 
eliminated there would be room and demand for 
all others. Reduction then should be made by 

m 



A Symposium* 


discrimination rather than by mechanical limita¬ 
tion of number on the part of the seminaries. 

There are two questions: How to discourage 
incompetent men so that they will not choose the 
ministry, and how to encourage able and devoted 
men so that they will choose it. There is danger 
in pointing out the competition for places due to 
the excess of numbers of holding back those who 
ought to be preachers. They have a moderate 
estimate of their own abilities and are the first to 
decide that they will not go where they are not 
needed. 

The first question can be partly answered by 
the seminaries. They can at least insist on a 
collegiate education. They can refuse to receive 
students who have not been through college. 
Although a liberal education does not of itself 
fit one to be a preacher, very few are qualified 
for the ministry who have not had such ad¬ 
vantage. “An uneducated ministry/’ said a dis¬ 
tinguished clergyman, “is the scourge of God.” 

The Eastern seminaries for the most part 
make this rule. If the Western seminaries had 
adopted it the last ten years, hundreds of half- 
educated clergyman would now be in some other 
occupation. Further, the seminaries should 
give pecuniary aid only to students whose stand- 
185 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


ing is above the average. The societies which 
make grants of aid should insist on the same con¬ 
ditions. At the doors of some of the seminaries 
is to be laid that lowering of the intellectual 
standards of the ministry which discourages 
many of the best men from becoming preachers. 
It is a gratifying fact that there is a disposition 
to raise the educational standard. As this is 
more and more insisted on a multitude of inferior 
men will be excluded. 

The second question can be answered by the 
young men themselves. The knowledge that the 
ministry is overcrowded and of the growing de¬ 
mand for well-equipped clergymen is reallv 
favorable to the choice of that profession by able 
and earnest young men. There is no longer an 
artificial pressure impelling them towards the 
ministry. They are no longer told that everv 
educated Christian should be a preacher unless 
there are decisive reasons to the contrary. They 
know that fitness as well as impulse should de¬ 
termine. They know that the reaction which 
has set in against unfit and uneducated men as¬ 
sures a welcome to those who have suitable gifts 
and thorough education. 

The recognition of an evil is a long step 
towards its correction. By all means let those 
*86 



A Symposium. 


who know they have only average abilities, inade¬ 
quate training and no strong bent for preaching 
choose some other occupation in which they can 
be more useful. And also, by all means, let those 
who have gifts of speech and persuasion, strong 
convictions, character and culture, choose the 
Christian Ministry, which for the right man is as 
truly the best profession as it ever was. Of such 
men there is need. For such men there are 
always places. 

Fitness for the ministry is not limited to bril¬ 
liant oratorical power. But there certainly 
should be ability to speak to a company of people 
so as to interest, instruct and impress them. 
There should be a strong impulse to bring men 
into the Christian faith and life. There should 
be the sympathetic temperament and the spirit of 
unselfishness. With such gifts, which are not 
uncommon, with a good education and with a 
strong inclination to preach one is certain of 
some measure of success. 

If a competent and devoted man is deterred by 
the overcrowding of the ministry, let him remem¬ 
ber that other professions and occupations are 
even more overcrowded so far as numbers are 
concerned and that it would be a miracle if the 
ministry were an exception, and that few men 
187 



What is the Matter with the Church? 


who are really fitted for the pursuits they have 
entered meet with total failure. 

I admit, then, that there are too many min¬ 
isters but not that there are too many well-quali¬ 
fied ministers. I think that exposure of the evils 
which attend the reception of inferior men will 
tend to turn them to other pursuits and that the 
seminaries will not make the path to the ministry 
so easy as it has been. The remedy is discrim¬ 
ination rather than wholesale reduction. 


THE END. 


1 * 88 ' 



THE 


Hbbey press 

114 

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NEW YORK 


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AUTHORS AND ARTISTS 




Colling, Wilkie. 
Cruikshank, George, Jr. 

De Mezailles, Jean. 
Dickeus, Charles. 
Drummond, Henry. 
Flattery, M. Douglas. 
Gardner, W. H. 

Graham, Marie. 

Hamilton, Sam A. 

Hamm, Margherita Arlina. 
Hartt, Ii*ene Widdemer. 
Howard, Eady Constance. 
Jennings, Edwin B. 
Johnson, Stanley Edwards. 
Jokai, Maurus. 

Kaven, E. Thomas. 
Kearney, Belle. 


Kent, Charles. 
Mankowski, Mary D. 
Martyn, Carlos. 

Miller, Andrew J. 

Mann, Charles Clark. 
Napoliello, B. B. 

Palier, Emile A. 

Parkes, Harry. 

Pash, Florence. 

Bideal, Charles F. 
Bunyan, N. P. 

Scribner, Kimball. 
Stevenson, Robert Eouis. 
Tabor, Edward A. 
Tolstoy, Count. 

Walker, Jessie A. 
Winter, C. Gordon. 


ADVERTISING AGENTS’ DIRECTORY, THE. 

Arranged alphabetically and in States, including 
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kind has ever before appeared. All who for 
any reason wish to know who the advertising 
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find the desired information here. The Directory 
is brought down strictly to date. Cloth. One 
Dollar. 

AMERICAN ELOQUENCE. 

Characteristic Types from Colonial Times to the 
Present Day. A Text Book of Oratory. By 
Carlos Martyn. 

AMERICAN MEN OF THE TIME. 

Being a Dictionary of Biographical Records of 
Eminent Men of the Day. Revised to date and 
edited by Charles F. Rideal, Fellow of the Royal 
Society of Literature. 

AMERICAN WOMEN OF THE TIME. 

Being a Dictionary of Biographical Records of 
Eminent Living Women. Revised to date and 
edited by Charles F. Rideal, Fellow of the Royal 
Society of Literature. It is the first time a book 
of reference of this kind has been compiled in the 
interests of any women in any country. The ef¬ 
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the end of securing a standard work, founded on 
reliable data, and which will be a suitable addi¬ 
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CHARLES DICKENS’ HEROINES AND WOMEN 
FOLK. 

Some Thoughts Concerning Them. A Revised 
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of “Dot” and “Edith Dombey,” by Florence 
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delightful little book, ’’—Institute, 

3 


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For the Home, School and Platform. Compiled 
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CHURCH WORKER’S BOOK. 

One Thousand Plans. By as Many Successful 
Clergymen and Other Christian Workers. By 
Carlos Martyn. 


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THE. 

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(retired). Not in many years has a more interest¬ 
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CROSS OF HONOR, THE 

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7 



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